The Rendering Pipeline - Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 - page 136

Figure 3.8. Triangle list and triangle strip primitives created from our input vertices.
Primitives with adjacency. In some situations, it is desirable to have adjacent primitive
information available for use in the pipeline. This means that every primitive will be pro-
vided to the pipeline with access to the primitives immediately neighboring it. There are
four different primitive topologies that provide adjacency information: line lists with ad-
jacency, line strips with adjacency, triangle lists with adjacency, and triangle strips with
adjacency. These representations provide significantly more information to the pipeline for
processing at the primitive level, at the expense of a higher memory and bandwidth cost per
primitive. Each of these primitive topologies is shown in Figures 3.9 and 3.10.
Control point primitives. To facilitate the use of higher-order primitives with the tessella-
tion pipeline, additional primitive topology selections are provided. There is one primitive
type for each number of control points, ranging from 1 to 32. This provides the ability to
perform a very large number of different control patch schemes. One sample control patch
primitive is shown in Figure 3.11.
Figure 3.9. Line lists and line strip primitives with adjacency created from our input vertices.