Version: Unity 6 Preview (6000.0)
LanguageEnglish
  • C#

GraphicsBuffer.Target.Structured

Suggest a change

Success!

Thank you for helping us improve the quality of Unity Documentation. Although we cannot accept all submissions, we do read each suggested change from our users and will make updates where applicable.

Close

Submission failed

For some reason your suggested change could not be submitted. Please <a>try again</a> in a few minutes. And thank you for taking the time to help us improve the quality of Unity Documentation.

Close

Cancel

Description

GraphicsBuffer can be used as a structured buffer.

In HLSL shaders, this maps to StructuredBuffer<T> or RWStructuredBuffer<T>.

When you construct a GraphicsBuffer of this type, the value of stride must match the stride of the corresponding StructuredBuffer struct type in your HLSL code.

The value of stride must also be a multiple of 4, and less than 2048.

To meet requirements on some platforms and avoid performance issues, stride should be a multiple of 16. Use float4 and float4x4 variables to create a multiple of 16, and put smaller variables inside them. Avoid the use of 'padding' variables to create a multiple of 16, for example using a float3 variable to pad a struct containing a single float, because some data types may be different sizes on different platforms.

If you use a mix of variable sizes, the data layout of a shader's structured buffer may be different depending on the graphics API. This means ComputeShader.SetBuffer or Material.SetBuffer might overwrite data or set variables to the wrong values. See Writing shaders for different graphics APIs for more information.

See Microsoft's HLSL documentation on StructuredBuffer and RWStructuredBuffer.

DirectX 11 does not allow Index or ::Vertex buffers to also be Structured. For compute shader mesh data access with DirectX 11 compatibility, it is best to use Raw.

Additional resources: GraphicsBuffer, ComputeShader, Material.SetBuffer.