Windows XP WPF Anti Aliasing
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Hi All, I just took the plunge ... I've enabled AA under WinXP. I'm producing a new WPF application using some controls and charting components from Infragistics. So far all is going really well with these controls. The only issue I had was the aliasing on the 3D content. I'm just posting here to find out if anyone has had any negative experiences with using the XP AA with WPF. We are currently doing our own investigations into potential problems like OS stability etc ... We need to do lots more as we are potentially going to offer a checkbox during installation that will also switch AA on for XP machine when our application is installed. Obviously we want to cover any and all eventualities upfront before making such an option available to end users. Just for information, this is not going to be a 'general realease' application its business to business stuff with a small user base and a large price tag meaning that we will also be making a very explicit minimum specification for the machine that will run this software. ie: new and powerful ... So far I've not seen *any* problems on my machine during development with XP AA switched on which is encouraging. Also isn't this going to be part of the fabled XP SP3?? :) Cheers,
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :)
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Hi All, I just took the plunge ... I've enabled AA under WinXP. I'm producing a new WPF application using some controls and charting components from Infragistics. So far all is going really well with these controls. The only issue I had was the aliasing on the 3D content. I'm just posting here to find out if anyone has had any negative experiences with using the XP AA with WPF. We are currently doing our own investigations into potential problems like OS stability etc ... We need to do lots more as we are potentially going to offer a checkbox during installation that will also switch AA on for XP machine when our application is installed. Obviously we want to cover any and all eventualities upfront before making such an option available to end users. Just for information, this is not going to be a 'general realease' application its business to business stuff with a small user base and a large price tag meaning that we will also be making a very explicit minimum specification for the machine that will run this software. ie: new and powerful ... So far I've not seen *any* problems on my machine during development with XP AA switched on which is encouraging. Also isn't this going to be part of the fabled XP SP3?? :) Cheers,
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :)
Jammer, Dumb question to be sure; what is AA? BTW: I sent all your information and questions/comments to the Blend Team last night.
Cheers, Karl» CodeProject 2008 MVP My Blog | Mole's Home Page | How To Create Screen Capture Videos For Your ArticlesJust a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.
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Jammer, Dumb question to be sure; what is AA? BTW: I sent all your information and questions/comments to the Blend Team last night.
Cheers, Karl» CodeProject 2008 MVP My Blog | Mole's Home Page | How To Create Screen Capture Videos For Your ArticlesJust a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.
Hey Karl, That is great news! I hope they find them constructive/useful. Would be great to know what they think. AA = anti aliasing ... I've just uploaded two example graphic files of my charts to my web server. this first link show you a version of the chart with NO XP anti aliasing applied. http://www.jammer.biz/images/wpf/chartalias.png[^] This next link shows you the same chart (well rotated slightly) WITH anti aliasing. http://www.jammer.biz/images/wpf/chartantialias.png[^] As you can see from a UI point of view the second example is head and shoulders better than the aliased version. So I'm currently testing the water to see if I encounter any horrible errors or stability issues whilst using the XP AA. Cheers,
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :)
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Hey Karl, That is great news! I hope they find them constructive/useful. Would be great to know what they think. AA = anti aliasing ... I've just uploaded two example graphic files of my charts to my web server. this first link show you a version of the chart with NO XP anti aliasing applied. http://www.jammer.biz/images/wpf/chartalias.png[^] This next link shows you the same chart (well rotated slightly) WITH anti aliasing. http://www.jammer.biz/images/wpf/chartantialias.png[^] As you can see from a UI point of view the second example is head and shoulders better than the aliased version. So I'm currently testing the water to see if I encounter any horrible errors or stability issues whilst using the XP AA. Cheers,
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :)
Fantasic difference. Very nice chart too. OK, another dumb question. How did you turn off AA on XP? Is this done in the video card software settings?
Cheers, Karl» CodeProject 2008 MVP My Blog | Mole's Home Page | How To Create Screen Capture Videos For Your ArticlesJust a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.
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Fantasic difference. Very nice chart too. OK, another dumb question. How did you turn off AA on XP? Is this done in the video card software settings?
Cheers, Karl» CodeProject 2008 MVP My Blog | Mole's Home Page | How To Create Screen Capture Videos For Your ArticlesJust a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.
Actually its a question of turning ON anti alias under XP as its default is turned off ... according to Microsoft as it can cause stability issues when using the XDDM drivers (as I understand it XDDM is the format of video drivers used by WinXP) In order to turn it on you need to add in keys to the registry here: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics] "MaxMultisampleType"=dword:00000004 "EnableDebugControl"=dword:00000001 By default the Avalon.Graphics key doesn't even exist in an XP registry.
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :)
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Actually its a question of turning ON anti alias under XP as its default is turned off ... according to Microsoft as it can cause stability issues when using the XDDM drivers (as I understand it XDDM is the format of video drivers used by WinXP) In order to turn it on you need to add in keys to the registry here: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics] "MaxMultisampleType"=dword:00000004 "EnableDebugControl"=dword:00000001 By default the Avalon.Graphics key doesn't even exist in an XP registry.
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :)
Wow, I'm learning something new each day! I've always had high end graphics cards (nVidia) in all my systems and thought the GPU and drives took care of all of this. I'll do some testing this weekend and see what comes up. Thank you!!
Cheers, Karl» CodeProject 2008 MVP My Blog | Mole's Home Page | How To Create Screen Capture Videos For Your ArticlesJust a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.
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Wow, I'm learning something new each day! I've always had high end graphics cards (nVidia) in all my systems and thought the GPU and drives took care of all of this. I'll do some testing this weekend and see what comes up. Thank you!!
Cheers, Karl» CodeProject 2008 MVP My Blog | Mole's Home Page | How To Create Screen Capture Videos For Your ArticlesJust a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.
Heh heh ... Karl, try being me on this forum at the moment! Learning C# after 10 years of FoxPro hurts, believe me! I'm learning something new about 3 times a minute!! Some seriously knowledgeable folks around here such as yourself. I'll say it again ... mole ... nuff said. Anyway, anything you do find out this weekend would be seriously good to know. As I understand it the only XP native anti aliasing that is available as a windows config option is the Font Smoothing / Clear Type stuff. When you get into the realms of nVidia / ATI things I think it really depends on how the tech talking to it is configured rather than it 'just using' the GPU and its inbuilt feature set. For instance I had a Quad core Xeon machine here that I develop on and it has a pretty hefty nVidia Quadro FX570 graphics card. Earlier when I first enabled the XP AA I also changed some of the nVidea 3D settings (stupid thing to do) when I then rebooted and started looking at some of the WPF stuff a lot of the 2D elements looked terrible even thought the 3D stuff looked great. I had to go and change the nVidia settings back to get the 2D & 3D stuff looking good. Its more of an issue of interaction between the two rather than a set it and forget it thing on the video card alone. I'm no graphics code man at all but these are a few things I've learned / noticed. I just don't like having spent all this cash on the Infragistics controls to then see all the pixels in their squarey glory! ;)
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :)
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Heh heh ... Karl, try being me on this forum at the moment! Learning C# after 10 years of FoxPro hurts, believe me! I'm learning something new about 3 times a minute!! Some seriously knowledgeable folks around here such as yourself. I'll say it again ... mole ... nuff said. Anyway, anything you do find out this weekend would be seriously good to know. As I understand it the only XP native anti aliasing that is available as a windows config option is the Font Smoothing / Clear Type stuff. When you get into the realms of nVidia / ATI things I think it really depends on how the tech talking to it is configured rather than it 'just using' the GPU and its inbuilt feature set. For instance I had a Quad core Xeon machine here that I develop on and it has a pretty hefty nVidia Quadro FX570 graphics card. Earlier when I first enabled the XP AA I also changed some of the nVidea 3D settings (stupid thing to do) when I then rebooted and started looking at some of the WPF stuff a lot of the 2D elements looked terrible even thought the 3D stuff looked great. I had to go and change the nVidia settings back to get the 2D & 3D stuff looking good. Its more of an issue of interaction between the two rather than a set it and forget it thing on the video card alone. I'm no graphics code man at all but these are a few things I've learned / noticed. I just don't like having spent all this cash on the Infragistics controls to then see all the pixels in their squarey glory! ;)
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :)
I'll give this all a go this weekend. I'll compare my XP and Vista results. My Vista system is SUPER high end across the board. The XP system is very good so it will be nice to compare them with the standard settings and see what goes on. Now that I'm thinking about it, the nVidia software on my XP machine does have the ability to AA in their 3D settings. I currently have it turned on too.
Cheers, Karl» CodeProject 2008 MVP My Blog | Mole's Home Page | How To Create Screen Capture Videos For Your ArticlesJust a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.
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I'll give this all a go this weekend. I'll compare my XP and Vista results. My Vista system is SUPER high end across the board. The XP system is very good so it will be nice to compare them with the standard settings and see what goes on. Now that I'm thinking about it, the nVidia software on my XP machine does have the ability to AA in their 3D settings. I currently have it turned on too.
Cheers, Karl» CodeProject 2008 MVP My Blog | Mole's Home Page | How To Create Screen Capture Videos For Your ArticlesJust a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.
Nice! My nVidia AA setting is set to "Application-Controlled" but this is how it was setup before I added in the XP AA reg keys. So this nVidia settings had no effect on WPF 3D content. All very intriguing ...
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :)
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I'll give this all a go this weekend. I'll compare my XP and Vista results. My Vista system is SUPER high end across the board. The XP system is very good so it will be nice to compare them with the standard settings and see what goes on. Now that I'm thinking about it, the nVidia software on my XP machine does have the ability to AA in their 3D settings. I currently have it turned on too.
Cheers, Karl» CodeProject 2008 MVP My Blog | Mole's Home Page | How To Create Screen Capture Videos For Your ArticlesJust a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.
