The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is an entirely new graphical display system for Windows. WPF is designed for .NET, influenced by modern display technologies such as HTML and Flash, and hardware-accelerated. It’s also the most radical change to hit Windows user interfaces since Windows 95.
A standard Windows application relies on two well-worn parts of the Windows operating system to create its user interface:
• User32 provides the familiar Windows look and feel for elements such as windows, buttons, text boxes, and so on.
• GDI/GDI+ provides drawing support for rendering shapes, text, and images at the cost of additional complexity (and often lackluster performance).
The new frameworks simply deliver better wrappers for interacting with User32 and GDI/GDI+. It can provide improvements in efficiency, reduce complexity, and add pre-baked features so you don’t have to code them yourself; but they can’t remove the fundamental limitations of a system component that was designed more than a decade ago.
DirectX: The New Graphics Engine
Microsoft created one way around the limitations of the User32 and GDI/GDI+ libraries: DirectX. Its design mandate was speed, and so Microsoft worked closely with video card vendors to give DirectX the hardware acceleration needed for complex textures, special effects such as partial transparency, and three-dimensional graphics.
In WPF, the underlying graphics technology isn’t GDI/GDI+. Instead, it’s DirectX. Remarkably, WPF applications use DirectX no matter what type of user interface you create. As a result, even the most mundane business applications can use rich effects such as transparency and anti-aliasing. You also benefit from hardware acceleration, which simply means DirectX hands off as much work as possible to the GPU (graphics processing unit), which is the dedicated processor on the video card.
Note:
• DirectX is more efficient because it understands higher-level ingredients such as textures and gradients, which can be rendered directly by the video card. GDI/GDI+ doesn’t, so it needs to convert them to pixel-by-pixel instructions, which are rendered much more slowly by modern video cards.
• The goal of WPF is to offload as much of the work as possible on the video card so that complex graphics routines are render-bound (limited by the GPU) rather than processor-bound (limited by your computer’s CPU). That way, you keep the CPU free for other work, you make the best use of your video card, and you are able to take advantage of performance increases in newer video cards as they become available.
A standard Windows application relies on two well-worn parts of the Windows operating system to create its user interface:
• User32 provides the familiar Windows look and feel for elements such as windows, buttons, text boxes, and so on.
• GDI/GDI+ provides drawing support for rendering shapes, text, and images at the cost of additional complexity (and often lackluster performance).
The new frameworks simply deliver better wrappers for interacting with User32 and GDI/GDI+. It can provide improvements in efficiency, reduce complexity, and add pre-baked features so you don’t have to code them yourself; but they can’t remove the fundamental limitations of a system component that was designed more than a decade ago.
DirectX: The New Graphics Engine
Microsoft created one way around the limitations of the User32 and GDI/GDI+ libraries: DirectX. Its design mandate was speed, and so Microsoft worked closely with video card vendors to give DirectX the hardware acceleration needed for complex textures, special effects such as partial transparency, and three-dimensional graphics.
In WPF, the underlying graphics technology isn’t GDI/GDI+. Instead, it’s DirectX. Remarkably, WPF applications use DirectX no matter what type of user interface you create. As a result, even the most mundane business applications can use rich effects such as transparency and anti-aliasing. You also benefit from hardware acceleration, which simply means DirectX hands off as much work as possible to the GPU (graphics processing unit), which is the dedicated processor on the video card.
Note:
• DirectX is more efficient because it understands higher-level ingredients such as textures and gradients, which can be rendered directly by the video card. GDI/GDI+ doesn’t, so it needs to convert them to pixel-by-pixel instructions, which are rendered much more slowly by modern video cards.
• The goal of WPF is to offload as much of the work as possible on the video card so that complex graphics routines are render-bound (limited by the GPU) rather than processor-bound (limited by your computer’s CPU). That way, you keep the CPU free for other work, you make the best use of your video card, and you are able to take advantage of performance increases in newer video cards as they become available.
WPF TIERS
Video cards differ significantly. When WPF assesses a video card, it considers a number of factors, including the amount of RAM on the video card, support for pixel shaders (built-in routines that calculate per-pixel
effects such as transparency), and support for vertex shaders (built-in routines that calculate values at the vertexes of a triangle, such as the shading of a 3-D object). Based on these details, it assigns a rendering tier value.
WPF recognizes three rendering tiers. They are as follows:
• Rendering Tier 0. The video card will not provide any hardware acceleration. This corresponds to a DirectX version level of less than 7.0.
• Rendering Tier 1. The video card can provide partial hardware acceleration. This corresponds to a DirectX version level greater than 7.0 but less than 9.0.
• Rendering Tier 2. All features that can be hardware accelerated will be. This corresponds to a DirectX version level greater than or equal to 9.0.
effects such as transparency), and support for vertex shaders (built-in routines that calculate values at the vertexes of a triangle, such as the shading of a 3-D object). Based on these details, it assigns a rendering tier value.
WPF recognizes three rendering tiers. They are as follows:
• Rendering Tier 0. The video card will not provide any hardware acceleration. This corresponds to a DirectX version level of less than 7.0.
• Rendering Tier 1. The video card can provide partial hardware acceleration. This corresponds to a DirectX version level greater than 7.0 but less than 9.0.
• Rendering Tier 2. All features that can be hardware accelerated will be. This corresponds to a DirectX version level greater than or equal to 9.0.
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