   MRTs versus METs
  Hi all,I was wondering if multi-element textures (METs) are actually useful, or if multiple render targets (MRTs) completely replace them.They seem very close in functionality, with the biggest difference being that MRTs are separate surfaces and METs have their elements interleaved. MRTs seem more flexibly because any render target format can be chosen, while with METs you can only choose a couple format combinations.In fact it looks like the only official format is D3DFMT_MULTI2_ARGB8 (MET1), which no popular graphics card supports? NVIDIA does seem to have a bunch of proprietary formats though: NVE0 - NVEd.So am I correct that METs are deprecated and we should use MRTs? Anyone know what the situation is like with DirectX 10?Thanks a lot,Nicolas   
  They're similar concepts, but one is a source of data (multielement textures) and the other is a sink of data (multiple render targets.I do notice that the terminology seems to get a little bit mixed-up on the nvidia developer site.  For instance, in their FAQ they say:Quote:Under DirectX 9.0, all all GeForce FX-class GPU's support floating point surfaces using the multi-element texture mechanism.  Multi-element textures, as described in the DXSDK documentation, allows you to render to 4 simultaneous outputs, each being 32-bits wide, for a total of 128-bits.  Each of these 32-bit components can be written to as 4x8, 2x16fp, or 1x32fp.They're talking about multiple render targets, but referring to it as multi-element textures.  This implies that you can use both together and render to a MET using MRTs, but its not clear that setting a MET as a render target implicitly binds all the elements.  I guess you could do a quick experiment with REF to find out.Relevant pages from the SDK docs: Multiple-element Textures, Multiple Render Targets;  METs are a bad hack for cards that don’t support MRT (GeForceFX Series).  Therefore D3D10 doesn’t know this concept anymore.   ;  I would just forget about MET's, unless you really want to target the Nvidia FX-series. IMO, it's not worth the headaches it will cause you.   ;  Thanks all for the information! I'll stick to using MRTs then, if available, and use multiple passes for the rest.   