Can Direct3D 11 do offscreen-only rendering (no swap chain)?

Question

Is it possible to use Direct3D 11 for rendering to textures only, i.e. without creating a swap chain and without creating any window? I have tried that and all my API calls succeed. The only problem is that the picture I am downloading from a staging texture is black.

I finally managed to capture a full stream using PIX (Parallel Nsight does not seem to work at all). PIX shows that my render target is black, too, although I clear it to blue.

Is it possible at all what I intend to do? If so, how would one do it?

Answer 1

Actually, the whole thing is working as intended if you initialise the device correctly.