It depends on what your layout actually is. Just to take "simple" text rendering... When you have just ASCII text rendered with monospace font then it probably

It depends on what your layout actually is. Just to take "simple" text rendering... When you have just ASCII text rendered with monospace font then it probably OK to do its full layout on each render run - that's really simple. But if you need to render, say, HN page then you'd better compute once and cache glyph positions. And other objects too that need calculations: gradients, tesselated shapes, etc. Check this: http://sciter.com/sciter-and-directx/ http://sciter.com/sciter-and-directx/ That's relatively simple UI rendered directly into DirectX as a batch of precomputed meshes. Ideally you should be able to take best of two worlds: immediate mode graphics and declarative one.