The Rendering Pipeline - Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 - page 137

Figure 3.10. Triangle list primitive with adjacency created from our input vertices.
Figure 3.11. Control patch primitives created from our input vertices.
3.3.3 Input Assembler Stage Processing
With all of the available settings of the input assembler, there is a wide variety of configu-
rations that can produce different output data to be used in the remainder of the pipeline.
Before investigating what is produced by each of these configurations, we will take a closer
look at exactly what is being done within the input assembler.
Vertex Streams
We have already seen how the input assembler creates streams of vertices by reading data
from the bound vertex buffers and combining it into individual vertices. This vertex stream
produces the vertices in one of two ordered sequences. The vertices are either left in their
existing order from their vertex buffers, or they are rearranged into the order specified