I need the ability to order the drawing of sprites and fonts. Some sprites need to be drawn behind and some in front of text. My problem is that my sprites and fonts use separate Begin() End() calls so I can't simply order the draw calls.
How is sorting generally done in DX9?
You say that you can't order your sprite drawing because they use separate begin/end calls.
The solution is to separate them into as many begin/end blocks as you need in order to get the sprites into the sorted order that you need.
If this is performance critical and you're trying to reduce state changes, then you can use the same shader to draw your fonts and sprites (fonts are also really just sprites). However, I'm guessing that this is premature optimization.
