Lounge?

Is it just me, or have all the articles on the home page taken leave? :^)

Check out this link... http://blogs.msdn.com/directx/archive/2009/09/29/comparing-direct2d-and-gdi.aspx[^] Specifically.. the first reader comment: "For whatever reason GDI+ slows so down in Windows 7, it is not understandable.... Reply: "Husker, the problem with GDI+ that you describe is related to new support for device bitmaps in Win7, and there's a workaround. In Vista, Microsoft stopped using XP Driver Model (XPDM) display drivers in scenarios in which the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) is running. Because of this, it meant that all GDI operations – which used to be hardware accelerated by XPDM drivers – became software-only (meaning, not hardware accelerated). Applications render via GDI to a software buffer, which is then blt’d via the DWM. In Windows 7, Microsoft modified the use of GDI in a couple important ways. First, the GDI back buffer maintained by DWM was moved from system memory into hardware aperature memory. This improves blt speed. Second, WDDM 1.1 drivers can hardware-accelerate a certain number of limited GDI operations (eg. solid color fill, etc). So, as long as you have a WDDM 1.1 driver, GDI is sort-of “reaccelerated”. The degree to which WDDM 1.1 cards can hardware accelerate depends on fill rate, etc. There’s a bug in GDI+ (which you’re describing above) that causes it to do readback from the hardware in a certain number of scenarios. The best way to use GDI+ in Windows 7 is to render with GDI+ to a DIB section and then blt the final result. You might want to give that a try before doing anything else. Tom