WPF performance
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I've created a basic WPF application, and typing text into the textbox is quite unresponsive. This machine is not quite current, but not that old either - 3Ghz Pentium 4 Hyper Threading, 2GB RAM, decent mainboard, running Windows XP & release version of .NET 3.5. By the looks of it, real-world WPF apps should be deployed on very current PCs running Windows Vista only. Is this a correct assumption?
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza
CP article: SmartPager - a Flickr-style pager control with go-to-page popup layer.
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Not sure if this will help - but you may want to check this out: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937106[^] Rene.
Well I tried with this and other variations: Quad XEON 3GHz, 1333Mhz bus, 8GB of RAM, 2003 64bit, NVidia 1000$+ card. Result, the same! With transparency or not. It is awful performance if you just test with a slightly more complex app, one say that involves mouse interactivity and continous display of say text and geometry based on gestures etc. I only placed 4 custom controls in my mark up and it was enough to choke (so you have to be wary what designers will do, not just users). The data set wasn't very large either and I do heavy clipping anyway, but in that case there was no sensible optimisation left, and the CPU would max out at 70-100 pretty frequently. In WinForms/GDI+ case it was 10x faster (you do have to know your floating point and primitive types though). For 2D MS says some transforms are impossible to do with GDI+ but you can see that for yourself albeit with a good effort and it ends up way, way faster with a bit more code. Then you can migrate when you feel users are ready to accept the WPF pain. And GDI well, it blows it all away by another 5x. So 50x times more slowness for WPF that of course gives you a higher abstraction and some great features (with less code). But point being if you don't need it or can find an alternative, you can pretty much shock users today with what their PCs are capable of. You will find very few if any GPU accelerated WPF bits out there, and Adobe is ahead in that game. Must be me (no conspiracy theory or flame), but since XP SP2 I cannot figure out why some OpenGL apps just exploded in CPU utilisation whilst before I barely saw them use it at all. Personally, I am waiting for WPF vNext (one we will all be test bunnies for yet again, ie Windows7 experiment), before bothering again, users simply don't want the penalty in my domain and we tried hard to sell them all the blog preaching that the tech enables in Java-slow visualisation.
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Nope! I have played with some WPF demos back when I was using Vista Beta 2 on a 1.7 ghz pentium system with 500 MB of RAM. One that machine just about everything was slow, but WPF worked decently. I know there are things that can slow down a WPF application. There was one game I tried and the animated background of the app (nothing else, just the background) would try to max my CPU all the time. Design is ofter the killer or lack of knowledge of best practices. Of course, there are other things that can slow it down such as a poor video card. On my AMD Athlon64 X2 3800 with 4GB RAM, so far most WPF apps work fine :) Of course, I think most of apps of today should be targeting tomorrow's hardware anyway, as by the time the app is mainstream, the hardware will be mainstream also..
Rocky <>< Blog Post: Handy utility app that is always on my machines! Tech Blog Post: Moving on up with Windows Live stuff and Plus!
It probably means your video card is not that great.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com link -
Nope! I have played with some WPF demos back when I was using Vista Beta 2 on a 1.7 ghz pentium system with 500 MB of RAM. One that machine just about everything was slow, but WPF worked decently. I know there are things that can slow down a WPF application. There was one game I tried and the animated background of the app (nothing else, just the background) would try to max my CPU all the time. Design is ofter the killer or lack of knowledge of best practices. Of course, there are other things that can slow it down such as a poor video card. On my AMD Athlon64 X2 3800 with 4GB RAM, so far most WPF apps work fine :) Of course, I think most of apps of today should be targeting tomorrow's hardware anyway, as by the time the app is mainstream, the hardware will be mainstream also..
Rocky <>< Blog Post: Handy utility app that is always on my machines! Tech Blog Post: Moving on up with Windows Live stuff and Plus!
Uhm Rocky, that other reply was to the O.P., not to you. Not sure how it came there - whether it was a CP bug or me replying to the wrong post.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com link -
I've created a basic WPF application, and typing text into the textbox is quite unresponsive. This machine is not quite current, but not that old either - 3Ghz Pentium 4 Hyper Threading, 2GB RAM, decent mainboard, running Windows XP & release version of .NET 3.5. By the looks of it, real-world WPF apps should be deployed on very current PCs running Windows Vista only. Is this a correct assumption?
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza
CP article: SmartPager - a Flickr-style pager control with go-to-page popup layer.
It probably means your video card is not that great. If you have a decent card, then an older machine should be fine.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com link -
I've created a basic WPF application, and typing text into the textbox is quite unresponsive. This machine is not quite current, but not that old either - 3Ghz Pentium 4 Hyper Threading, 2GB RAM, decent mainboard, running Windows XP & release version of .NET 3.5. By the looks of it, real-world WPF apps should be deployed on very current PCs running Windows Vista only. Is this a correct assumption?
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza
CP article: SmartPager - a Flickr-style pager control with go-to-page popup layer.
It's not entirely correct to assume that WPF is only for dual core machines and other very up to date equipment. However I am wondering what VGA-adapter you have in your machine, I tried running several complex WPF applications on a virtual machine with 8MB vga memory and I found out that it was rather slow.
WM. What about weapons of mass-construction? "What? Its an Apple MacBook Pro. They are sexy!" - Paul Watson My blog
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I've created a basic WPF application, and typing text into the textbox is quite unresponsive. This machine is not quite current, but not that old either - 3Ghz Pentium 4 Hyper Threading, 2GB RAM, decent mainboard, running Windows XP & release version of .NET 3.5. By the looks of it, real-world WPF apps should be deployed on very current PCs running Windows Vista only. Is this a correct assumption?
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza
CP article: SmartPager - a Flickr-style pager control with go-to-page popup layer.
Heh, i noticed the same thing. It's not horrible, just enough of a delay that i can't comfortably watch the screen while i type. And this is on a < 1yr old laptop, on a form containing a listbox, a rich text box, a slider, and a label. With nothing attached to any of them.
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It probably means your video card is not that great. If you have a decent card, then an older machine should be fine.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com linkNope I don't think that's it. I have a fast & very capable Nvidia card, with very recent drivers. Just to be clear, my simple WPF app displayes fine and works, it just renders a bit slugishly when I type text in a textbox. And the caret sort of follows the last character with a half-second delay. I'm just really suprised, since my computer can handle the latest games ok, but this textbox has it stumped! :doh: :-D
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza
CP article: SmartPager - a Flickr-style pager control with go-to-page popup layer.
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Nope! I have played with some WPF demos back when I was using Vista Beta 2 on a 1.7 ghz pentium system with 500 MB of RAM. One that machine just about everything was slow, but WPF worked decently. I know there are things that can slow down a WPF application. There was one game I tried and the animated background of the app (nothing else, just the background) would try to max my CPU all the time. Design is ofter the killer or lack of knowledge of best practices. Of course, there are other things that can slow it down such as a poor video card. On my AMD Athlon64 X2 3800 with 4GB RAM, so far most WPF apps work fine :) Of course, I think most of apps of today should be targeting tomorrow's hardware anyway, as by the time the app is mainstream, the hardware will be mainstream also..
Rocky <>< Blog Post: Handy utility app that is always on my machines! Tech Blog Post: Moving on up with Windows Live stuff and Plus!
Seems my problem is too little knowledge :-O .. I was randomly playing with the properties of the window and I had a bitmap effect set. Without that it was all good :-\
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza
CP article: SmartPager - a Flickr-style pager control with go-to-page popup layer.
-
Seems my problem is too little knowledge :-O .. I was randomly playing with the properties of the window and I had a bitmap effect set. Without that it was all good :-\
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza
CP article: SmartPager - a Flickr-style pager control with go-to-page popup layer.
Yep, that is one issue in WPF though, there are many ways you can bring a system to its knees. Over the coming years, I am sure there will be more than a few applications seem like they are barely able to run becuase some new developers thought they program would look cool with a moving 3D rendered background or some other power hungry function :)
Rocky <>< Blog Post: Handy utility app that is always on my machines! Tech Blog Post: Moving on up with Windows Live stuff and Plus!