   Rendering directly to texture mip surfaces
  HiIs it possible to render directly to a texture's mipmap surface without having to get the surface, lock it and change it?  I'm thinking about creating a texture on the fly including its mipmap chain.  Can I render a quad (with, say, 4096x4096 pixels) and store that as the top level surface mipmap level 0, and then pass that successively down the mipmap chain filtering each level and storing each mipmap appropriately in the texture?Would it be really GPU intensive to do this to the same texture 4 times per frame?  I estimated it at 1 draw call per miplevel quad (with 4 texture lookups in each), 11 mipmaps per texture so 44 DIP calls in total.  The question was more aimed at whether this involves lots of CPU-GPU bandwidth or can it all be done on the GPU?Thanks   
  The card can indeed handle the mips for you, if the appropriate cap bit is set.Take a look at this.   ;  I will be using the same texture as a render surface 4 times per frame though and then using it on other geometry, so do you know if the mipmaps be automatically updated by the hardware if I use it as a render target intra-frame?Thanks   ;  Auto-generation of mipmaps is pretty quick, but it will probably be noticeable if you're doing 4 times a frame on such a huge texture.  Best way to find out for sure is to just try it.Which exact API are you using?  In D3D9 you have to manually trigger mipmap generation.  In D3D10 I'm not sure if this is the case.   ;  I'm using D3D9.  I will definitely do some profiling, I just wanted to check to see if it was a viable idea before starting the work.Thanks for the quick responses, guys.   