In Silverlight there was an abillity to visualize GPU rendering.
eg: elements that was rendered on GPU would highlight in Magenta while everything else was normal colored.
Is there a similar feature for WPF ?
To make sure that what I'm trying to optimize is actually doing what i want it to ..
edit:
I found the function in Silvelright, it's called EnableCacheVisualization and apparantly this doesn't apply to WPF because WPF is running directly on GPU...
I wonder if there is a repaint / redraw visualizer instead like in browsers, which helps me find problems...
Related
I have to show stereoscopic 3D graphics on a WPF control.
I already have the code which create two DirectX-9 textures to show, one texture for each eye.
I want to use 3D Vision (not anaglyph).
I considered the following ways to show the two pictures as 3D stereo:
Using OpenGL or DirectX 11.1 Stereo API.
Using NvAPI_Stereo_SetActiveEye as described here:
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/40505/WP-05482-001_v01-final.pdf
Using NVidia stereo signature as described here:
NV_STEREO_IMAGE_SIGNATURE and DirectX 10/11 (nVidia 3D Vision)
Trying rendering the two picture one-after-one, hoping that CompositionTarget.Rendering not loosing too much VSyncs, and synchronizing if single VSyncs are lost. In addition turning on the 3D Vision emitter by some invisible control rendering a fictive stereoscopic image.
Rendering 3D scene and letting NVidia driver to make it stereoscopic automatically.
Rendering to some real Windows control (such as Winform control), and using WPF host (such as WinFormHost) to show the content.
The problems with the above methods are:
1-3: One of the first three ways seem to be the straight-forward solution, but are not possible in WPF since I cannot create the Device/Context and control the way that the picture is rendered.
4: With CompositionTarget.Rendering I get only about ~60Hz instead of 120Hz. I guess the problem is that EndScene() is called twice - one in my rendered scene and the other in WPF rendering mechanism, but am not sure. Anyway even if will work - that solution seems to be unstable.
5: Rendering 3D scene is not possible in my case for some technical reasons which forces me to render the two images for the two eyes by myself.
6: The problem with WinFormHost and its friends is that it is not a WPF control and it has unexpected behavior in terms of WPF controls. For example the WinForm control will hide WPF controls which are higher on the logical tree, it cannot be rotated using RotateTransform and more.
For now I chose the last solution - using WinFormHost. Does anyone know a solution for that unbreakable wall with making stereoscopic 3D within real WPF control?
We have a few icons in our WPF application. We want to do an animation, pretty much like a small beacon of light going around the edges of the animation, just endlessly going around it, and following the silhouette of the icons. We found a way to do it by manually creating a path around the icons and have the beacon follow that path (which matches the silhouette), but it's too much manual work because we have a lot of different shaped icons. We're wondering if there's a way for WPF to do this automatically, so we just have to program it once, and then using on the rest of the icons.
Any suggestion very welcome.
Thanks.
Edit
Something like this.
Gee. Isn't that overkill to use wpf animation capabilities for that? Can't you just create a bunch of small animations in Photoshop or using something else and just put them in?
Like animated .GIFs. the only problem would be that: if I'm remembering it right, WPF have problems with animating .GIFs as embedded resources. So you have to load them from the disk. Or you can have them as embedded resources, but you have to extract them temporarily to the disk and then load them into your app's window.
If you are using .NET 3.5 SP1 or greater and you are requiring a code solution instead of the animated GIFs, my suggestion would be a Pixel Shader. You would need to write your own Pixel Shader that does the following:
Detect the edges. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/openGL/EdgeDetection.aspx
Takes an input parameter that can be animated with a storyboard that indicates the position of the beacon. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dialog/WpfParentWindowShader.aspx
Highlights the edge that is indicated by the beacon position parameter and returns the original color for all other points in the image.
If you haven't worked with Pixel Shaders I would recommend downloading the Shazzam Tool, http://shazzam-tool.com/. It includes an interactive development environment to create and test your shader on simple images and also includes a decent number of Pixel Shaders with source code to help you learn about them.
I'm writing a Video application utilizing D3DImage. Frames are from memory and rendered as textures in native code with DirectX9, finally exposed by D3DImage to the WPF GUI. I have some Overlays on top, created with WPF's painting framework (Text, shapes etc.). Up to this point, it works like a charm.
Now, I would like encode the composited image from my underlying native C++ code. Video is 640x480 BGR, 25 FPS and has to be rendered and encoded in parallel, also on older Hardware with Windows versions down to XP/SP3.
Problem is, I cannot find any documentation describing the composition process between WPF and D3DImage. They 'blend' in some sense, but what is the meaning of this? And is it possible to get a handle to the WPF's part of the drawing or even the composited image in my native C++ code?
p.s: I'm also open to managed solutions, but didn't found much performant up to now.
There is global static method called "CompositionTarget.Rendering". Add an event to that and every time WPF renders that method will be called before WPF presents(the FPS can vary though). So just updated your renderTarget accordingly.
There might be a better way, but i'm not aware of it.
NOTE:: Also for D3DImage on WindowsXP you use a D3D9 device with a lockable renderTarget while on Vista/7 you use a D3D9Ex device with a non-lockable renderTarget. Just a note.
I'm in a situation that requires many animations with effects like transparency to be applied but when there are about 10 of them running, my application slows down to a grinding halt! :(
I also, tried implementing a particle like effect using a frame by frame manual animation using the CompositionTarget.Rendering event, which changed an Image's Source property at a given framerate. Again, this works fine for the first few instances of the particles on the screen, but when more and more get added I need it to stay performance wise, which is always a tough ask for any application
I was wondering if anyone has any experience using pixel shaders in WPF for animations, or perhaps custom writeablebitmap's for animations?
I basically need to palm off most of the animation processing to the GPU if possible...
Thanks for any help you can give!
Cheers,
Mark
If you want performance you should think about using XNA instead.
Then, you can add the XNA project into your WPF app
I just bought a touchpad wich allows drawing and using multitouch. The api is not supported fully by windows 7, so I have to rely on the build in config dialog.
The basic features are working, so if I draw something in my WPF tool, and use both fingers to do a right click, I can e.g. change the color. What I want to do now is assign other functions to special features in WPF.
Does anybody know how to find out in what way the pad communicates with the app? It works e.g. in Firefox to scroll, like it should (shown on this photo). But I do not know how to hookup the scroll event, I tried a Scrollviewer (which ignores my scroll attempts) and I also hooked up an event with the keypressed, but it does not fire (I assume the pad does not "press a key" but somehow sends the "scroll" command direclty. How can I catch that command in WPF?
Thanks a lot,
Chris
[EDIT] I got the scroll to work, but only up and down, not left and right. It was just a stupid "listbox in scrollviewer" mistake. But still not sure about commands like ZOOM in (which is working even in paint).. Which API contains such things?
[EDIT2] Funny, the zoom works in Firefox, the horizontal scrolling does not. But, in paint, the horizontal scrolling works...
[EDIT 3] Just asked in the wacom forum, lets see about vendor support reaction time...
http://forum.wacom.eu/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1939
Here is a picture of the config surface to get the idea what I am talking about: (Bamboo settings, I try to catch these commands in WPF)
alt text http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/3751/20091008210914.jpg
Have you had a look at this yet.
WPF 3.5 does not natively support multi-touch (it is coming in WPF 4.0) however the samples in that kit should get you started using the Windows7 Integration Library which access the native Win32 APIs to provide the required support (Don't worry its not real ugly:).