Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere - I'm rather new to DX. My question concerns conservation of resources - specifically textures in VRAM. I assume that upon returning from a call to CreateTexture2D, a copy of any textures data supplied has been copied elsewhere, likely VRAM. Does DX11 have any facility for having multiple ID3D11Texture2D objects which point to the same data?
This might at first seem silly, but imagine a ID3D11Texture2D which is an array of textures. In one material, an artist has chosen to blend three identically sized maps, saved on disk as A.dds, B.dds, and C.dds. Then imagine they have another material which also uses three maps, but this time A.dds, B.dds, and D.dds.
The shader code knows the diffuse texture is a texture array, and also has the number of layers baked (three in each case). I would essentially like to set up just two ID3D11Texture2D objects, one for each material, but I don't want to waste VRAM for two identical copies of A.dds and B.dds.
I could use explicit texture arrays, of course, but this reduces the number of resources available to the shader and can complicate code somewhat more than would otherwise be needed.
