Shader resource view (SRV) and Unordered Access view (UAV)

Shader resource views typically wrap textures in a format that the shaders can access them. An unordered access view provides similar functionality, but enables the reading and writing to the texture (or other resource) in any order.

Wrapping a single texture is probably the simplest form of shader resource view. More complex examples would be a collection of subresources (individual arrays, planes, or colors from a mipmapped texture), 3D textures, 1D texture color gradients, and so on.

Unordered access views are slightly more costly in terms of performance, but allow, for example, a texture to be written to at the same time that it is being read from. This enables the updated texture to be re-used by the graphics pipeline for some other purpose. Shader resource views are for read only use (which is the most common use of resources).

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