Does Direct3D11 include color space conversion?

Question

I'm investigating Direct3D11 for displaying video output; in particular, I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to give a YUV surface to Direct3D11 and have it automatically (ie in hardware) convert it to RGB and present it as such. The documentation of DXGI_MODE_DESC states:

Because of the relaxed render target creation rules that Direct3D 11 has for back buffers, applications can create a DXGI_FORMAT_B8G8R8A8_UNORM_SRGB render target view from a DXGI_FORMAT_B8G8R8A8_UNORM swap chain so they can use automatic color space conversion when they render the swap chain.

What does this "automatic color space conversion" refer to? Is there anything in Direct3D11 that does what I'm looking for or must this be performed either pre-render or through a shader?

Answer 1

When creating a texture in DX11 you can choose a number of formats that will inform shaders about the data structures. These formats belong to DXGI_FORMAT enum. They are basically various configurations of ARGB color format, so they allow you to specify for example a B8G8R8A8 or R16G16B16A16. There is however no option for YUV format.

The best thing you can do is passing your YUV data to the shader pipeline, "pretending" that they're RGB. Then in the pixel shader perform a conversion to the real RGB format. This solution should be sufficiently efficient because the conversion will be executed on GPU, in parallel for every visible pixel of your texture.