New seemingly useless INFO message
Starting recently (noticed in June or August SDK, but may have occured sooner), if you have an FVF vertex buffer and use a shader you get an "INFO: Using FVF buffers with programmable pipeline" (Not an exact quote, sorry) message EVERY TIME you draw. As far as I know, an FVF buffer just means you may use it as a destination for ProcessVertices(). Is there some performance disadvantage to using FVF buffers? I'm just trying to figure out why the new INFO appears, flooding the output window.
Also the level of this INFO seems high. Things like aligned matrix INFO messages only appear when the debug level is cranked up. These info messages appear even with default mid-level debug settings, possibly even with lower levels of output too.
What I've always done is if the buffer contains data that can be represented with an FVF, I supply it to CreateVertexBuffer. If I'm using data that can't fit in an FVF, I supply 0. Doing this now floods your output window, and I can't think of any reason why I'd be interested in this message. Sure, it's true, but why do I care?
Though we're using the newer SDKs, we're still targetting DX8.1. I'm not sure if the INFO messages appear when using a DX9.0c device, though I can't see why a message would be added to old DX8 code if it wasn't shared with DX9.
Does anyone know why this message was added, and/or if there is additional limits imposed by having specified an FVF that I should be aware of?
I've done some extra testing, and it seems that while the message appears with the libs from the June 2005 SDK, it's limited to the DX8 libs. I took a DX9 app and put an FVF in the vertex buffer create call, while using shaders, and no info messages were generated.
I'm still not sure what message the INFO message is trying to convey, but as we don't actually need FVF buffers, and it's limited to DX8 libraries, and we're coming towards the end of the DX9 lifecycle, I'd say it's a safe bet that we can ignore this message, and call this case closed.
