DirectX Support ..

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 1:23 pm

I have tried numerous times to implement the (.NET) waterfall, surface, and color spectrogram charts, but have found them way to slow and CPU intensive. This has caused me to design my own DirectX color spectrogram chart, simply to see if this was possible, and what the performance would be using managed DirectX. I have found that DirectX handles this job VERY well.

Could you please consider moving some of your more graphics intensive chart types over to DirectX, utilizing the GPU instead of the CPU. I would be more than happy to share with you my DirectX widget (it's not very pretty), so long as you work to implement it into the next release. My preference would be to use tChart for all of my charting needs, as opposed to start "rolling my own". For my work, super fast line and color spectrogram charts are a must.

Post by **Christopher** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 3:22 pm

Hello Mark,

Many thanks for your interest in TChart and your offer of code to enhance it!

Have you integrated your DirectX widget into TChart, possibly by creating your own DirectX canvas by inheriting from the Steema.TeeChart.Drawing.Graphics3D class? If you haven't integrated your DirectX widget into TeeChart but have used it to draw your own charting routines, have you been able to compare the speed of drawing in milliseconds between this widget and an identically functioning GDI+ widget?

We would be very interested in the results of speed trials comparing GDI+ with DirectX but obviously these trials only have significance if they are used to draw the same code (comparing TeeChart's waterfall (using GDI+) to your waterfall (using DirectX) isn't necessarily a comparison of GDI+ and DirectX per se).

The other interesting question is: which version of Managed DirectX did you use? It seems to us that Managed DirectX (MDX) has branched into the XNA Framework (for gaming) and the Windows Presentation Framework (for GUIs) and as such is a technology with a limited life span.

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 7:28 pm

Christopher,

Thank you for your reply. I implemented the Dx color spectrogram completely separate from tChart, it is it' own component in C#. I have not performed side-by-side comparison of my component with tChart, but my guess is that having the GPU take care of a spectrogram will always be better than GDI+. I can say that the tChart color spectrogram brings the CPU to it knees as more data gets added to the chart, and as the chart is made larger.

I cannot comment much on the life of Dx, except that I would never anticipate it going away as games are the key driver for high performance computing, and Microsoft is sure driving much of the game market. I agree that it may morph into something else, but the key concept of offloading intensive graphics drawing to the GPU will be around for ever.

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 7:30 pm

Christopher,

I sure wish I could get as fast of a reply on my other post concerning the cursor tools as I did here! Could you possibly make comment on this post? Thanks.

Post by **Christopher** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 7:59 am

Mark,

Thank you for your reply. I implemented the Dx color spectrogram completely separate from tChart, it is it' own component in C#. I have not performed side-by-side comparison of my component with tChart, but my guess is that having the GPU take care of a spectrogram will always be better than GDI+. I can say that the tChart color spectrogram brings the CPU to it knees as more data gets added to the chart, and as the chart is made larger.

I don't doubt that DirectX is faster than GDI+ for drawing 3D shapes, my interest is in knowing *how much* faster it actually is. As I mentioned before, rather than a side by side comparison of your component with TChart, a comparison of your component using MDX with your component using GDI+ would be much more meaningful.

I cannot comment much on the life of Dx, except that I would never anticipate it going away as games are the key driver for high performance computing, and Microsoft is sure driving much of the game market. I agree that it may morph into something else, but the key concept of offloading intensive graphics drawing to the GPU will be around for ever.

Well, according to this link (look at the bottom of the page):
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937793.aspx

Q: Will there be any more improvements to Managed DirectX 2.0?
A: The Managed DirectX 2.0 beta libraries were declared deprecated in April 2006, and expired on October 5th, 2006.

and

Q: What does this all mean regarding Managed DirectX (MDX) 1.1?
A: MDX 1.1 is in sustained engineering mode, and will not have any new functionality added to it. If you have a gaming scenario that needs a specific feature found only in MDX 1.1, please let us know and we will consider it for the XNA Framework.

You are absolutely right when you say that more and more graphics are going to be drawn using the GPU. From what I've read (here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220.aspx and here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173477.aspx and here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... ndgdiDXD3D) Vista's new WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) allows all graphics APIs, including GDI+ and GDI, to use the GPU and does so through the Windows Graphics Foundation 1.0 (WGF 1.0, or is that Direct3D 10?) which is the new name for the latest version of DirectX. What this means is that any speed differences between MDX and GDI+ which can be experienced on older Microsoft OSs are only going to get smaller as Vista's WDDM and WGF technologies improve.

That is not to say that Steema is not interested in creating new canvases that interact more fully with faster rendering APIs! We are obviously very interested and are planning to release a WPF canvas (XAML) in the near future and are also looking at releasing an XNA Framework canvas longer term.

Post by **Christopher** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 8:05 am

Mark,

I sure wish I could get as fast of a reply on my other post concerning the cursor tools as I did here! Could you possibly make comment on this post? Thanks.

Which post is that, Mark? I've clicked on the "Find all posts by Mark" link (here http://www.teechart.net/support/search. ... or=9637796) and can't find a post of yours which refers to cursor tools!