What Are Vertex Buffers?
Vertex Buffers were created into Direct3D8, as a way of creating a rendering pipeline system which allows the processing to be shared by both the CPU and the GPU (of the video hardware). Vertex Buffers provide us with a mechanism of being able to fill in vertex buffer data with the CPU, while at the same time allowing the GPU to process an earlier batch of vertices. In effect, giving us the ability to achieve a small degree of parallel processing during our game. So what does using a vertex buffer in our game help us over just allocating a hunk of memory to stick our vertex data in? Well, theoretically, a vertex buffer is optimized by the device driver for faster access and flexibility within our rendering pipeline.
