What to use for fast 2D graphics?

Monday, August 6. 2007

Got this question on email today:

I need to build the fastest possible 2D grid control for a trading application (no 3D whatsoever). Should I use DirectX or GDI+?

Which is a pretty good question. We give a lot of overview and background material in the SDK, but not a lot of prescriptive guidance.

As a bit of background on this topic:

GDI+ is ready to go in this case, as it is a 2D API.

D3D is a 3D API, so you have to do a lot of non-trivial work to build 2D primitives on top of it, which is just what we did for WPF.

And just to have a complete answer, I do not recommend using GDI. Unless there is some backwards compatibility requirement or integration issue, I would definetely recommend GDI+ over GDI, as it provides better quality rendering, a better primitive set, and wider image format support.

Here is the decision process I would recommend in relation to selecting between the technologies:

if you are doing native code (C++/COM) use GDI+ (knowing that you do not get HW acceleration)

if you can use managed code, try out WPF and see if its model fits what you want to do

if you have the expertise, time, and the value to you is worth the effort, try building a 2D layer on D3D

I know of other companies that have built 2D charting/graphing applications using WPF, and there is a learning curve, but they managed to achieve what they were looking for and are now happy with the results.

Turns out that, in this particular case, the developer was already using managed code, in which case giving WPF a try is the best fist choice. Validate that the model works for you, keep an eye on performance (as you learn the tricks of the new programming model), and go for it.

-Pablo

Posted by Pablo Fernicola in Technical at 23:01 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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Developers may also want to consider the effects of remoting on their applications using technologies like Terminal Services or Citrix. In terms of performance, GDI wins hands down today in terms of 'remotability'.

The rest all are slow in comparison as they require bitmap image transfers, which even when compressed over the network, will be slow in many cases. Of course, if you can remote from a Vista to Vista box, WPF may do well, but the number of cases of that happening in the real world would be very few. Solutions have been 'promised' for Server 2008 and Citrix, but until they're shipping and available, developers may not want to count on their availability.

Given my experience with WPF, I'm skeptical that an application needing 'high performance' will do well in WPF. The 'fastest' possible should really do GDI and avoid GDI+. It's possible to build something fast in GDI+ -- but they'll need to learn the tricks. WPF also has a high end machine requirement that is significantly higher than one using just GDI+. But, if 'fastest' possible is needed -- avoid GDI+ and go straight to GDI (just like the WinForms team did in V2 for label rendering).

#1 Aaron (Link) on 2007-08-07 08:36 (Reply)

For the time being, I'm stuck on XP. I tried using WPF (line geometry in a DrawingVisual). While I'm still learning WPF, my application (which draws a graph with thousands of lines) is at least 5x slower in WPF than it was in GDI. Is there a way I can combine GDI in a WPF application until I can move to Vista?

#2 Doug Beck on 2007-09-13 21:15 (Reply)

Blx.

Useless.

Why not just fix your mistakes and gives a clean native 2D api to DirectX.

WPF is dog slow and will never ever even approach what games guys are capable of. Even with new optimization plan for CLR vnext..

Why do you guys keep avoiding this basic, simple, addressable, resolvable task?

#3 q on 2008-03-01 10:32 (Reply)

I am literally doing the same thing - creating a trading application and need to visualize the security data. I've found that WPF is too slow. When there are over 10,000 "objects" redrawing takes seconds on a quad core machine. I've tried all sorts of teaks to increase performance too. Anything above 2,000 "objects" I've found WPF to be too slow to handle. In GDI+ I can draw over 10,000 lines in a couple of milliseconds. I really thought I would have more of a choice, but for me it's either DirectX or GDI+ - and since I'm doing managed code I'll probably chose GDI+.

#4 Chris Goetschius on 2008-05-19 08:46 (Reply)

Same problem. There are cool things that I would like to use like AdornerDecorator on selected graphical objects (read: lines with thousands of points), and I'm just stuck since GDI+ just does it faster (but unfortunately not fast enough to keep the things simple) and WPF is VERY SLOW (PIV 1.8 Ghz Proc with 1GB RAM hell knows what video card). I was looking towards manualy composing WMF files in memory and it gave 5 times better results than drawing calls directly to GDI+ device for charts like line or candlestick but only 1.5 performance boost for chart like Point'n'Figure.

#4.1 HellAwaits on 2008-06-26 13:38 (Reply)

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