DirectX8: Render Only Portions of Screen?

Hullo all :)

I'm curious about rendering when it comes to updating the screen for an application. For simplicity, let's say I'm making a game (see attatchment below).

The middle portion is the actual screen. So every frame something new is there, hence, I need to refresh everything every frame. But, the buttons/border around the middle rarely (if ever) change.

While learning DirectX, I noticed that in the code:
D3DDevice->Clear(0, NULL, D3DCLEAR_TARGET|D3DCLEAR_ZBUFFER, D3DCOLOR_XRGB(0, 0, 0), 1.0f, 0);
There is a "Target" you can clear.

I was wondering, if this means I can make two (in DirectX7 terms) surfaces. I.e. one for the Scene Rendering, and another for the border. And Render to the Scene's Surface every time, but only Call a Second Render Procedure (that of my border) when an event triggers the need for re-drawing?

My concern is that redrawing a border that doesn't need to be redrawn is a waste of time.

I hope I've made what I'm asking understandable :) Any input/ideas/better methods of solving this are definitely appreciated :)

Thanks for now

Edit: I missed a bracket on that picture, ah well :) And those squiggly things are trees (meant to represent a part of the scene :))

Yes it is possible to do what you want. However, I don't think your method is faster than one complete blit of the screen.

In a double buffering setup you draw everything to the double buffer and then copy the double buffer contents over to the primary buffer or the screen.

push ds
lds esi,[DoubleBuffer]
les edi,[Screen]
mov cx,[SizeOfScreenInDWORDS]
rep stosd

As well if this function is supported in hardware, you will gain the advantage of video acceleration which probably supports 64 to 128 bit blits depending on the board architecture and AGP setup. If the card does the blit, the CPU does not have to - extremely fast.

But in your case you are wanting to draw from 2 buffers to place them into one and then blit each one seperately. This will most definitely be slower simply because 2 blits are always going to be slower than 1 - twice as many instructions - at best.

Best bet is to place everything in the secondary buffer, including your not oft updated menu items, and then blit the entire thing using DirectX8Surface->Flip();

For instance, in a shooter, even though the player is not moving the screen is redrawn at least 60 times per second - waste of time yes....but its so fast who cares. Most video cards will blit so fast you can write crappy code and it will still get good frame rates.

So draw the whole thing every frame. You may not realize it, but it can actually be slower blitting a portion of the screen than blitting the whole thing. Not always true - but blitting a portion of the screen always requires several extra instructions. Granted the blit string will be shorter thus resulting in a fast blit, but sometimes the extra instructions to get the blit to stay within your 'window' make up the difference in cycles.

Okie dokes :) Thanks for the tip Bubba.