Pass large array to pixel shader

Question

I am trying to write a Pixelshader for a curve effect in Direct2d.

A curve effect maps each color channel value to a different value by using a look up table.

For this effect I would need to pass 3 arrays to the effect. Each array has 256 entries to map the specific color channel.

How can I pass these arrays to a Pixel shader (i.e. Direct2d Effect)?

Answer 1

You can pass arrays as 1D textures (which usually are 2D textures with height set to 1). Or 2D, if you need to store more than 2048/4096/8192 items - depending on graphics card. A 1D texture look-up is done by dividing array index by array size and then aligned to pixel centers with the required offsets. A 2D texture look-up is about the same, the only difference being texture coordinate calculation from array index - it's something like this with 2D textures:

float2 texcoord = ( float2( array_index % texture_width, array_index / texture_height ) + texel_offset ) / float2( texture_width, texture_height );