As we've already learned, the visuals that WPF can output, while beautiful, can be very CPU-intensive, and we often need to bear this in mind when designing our Views. However, rather than compromising our designs, we can offload the intensive rendering processes to the host computer's Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) instead.
While WPF will default to utilize its software rendering pipeline, it is also able to take advantage of a hardware rendering pipeline. This hardware pipeline leverages features of Microsoft DirectX, as long as the host PC has DirectX version 7, or higher, installed. Furthermore, if the version of DirectX that is installed is version 9 or higher, increased performance improvements will be seen.
The WPF Framework looks at the graphics hardware that is installed on the computer that it is running on and puts it into one of three categories, depending on its features, such as video RAM, shaders, and support for multi...
