Slow WPF performance on GMA 500 integrated graphics

Question

My team is developing WPF applications to be deployed on an Intel Atom Z530 netbook hardware platform. The Intel Atom Z530 comes with Intel GMA 500 integrated graphics, which h

Answer 1

I'm almost certain that Atom processors with those graphics were never even considered when WPF was in its design and first implementation phases. WPF was in development over five years ago, long before GMA 500 graphics were around.

You may have better results with the Silverlight 4 stack, which was certainly designed for lightweight environments. Much of what is possible in WPF is similar or identical in Silverlight. If you're not using WPF's 3D graphics or any of the other features, you may be able to get an easy port of the XAML, at least.

Answer 2

Are you running .Net 4 on Windows Embedded Standard 7? I've found that WPF runs much better in Windows 7 than XP.

What are your specific performance problems?

If it's animation, try using cached composition (.Net 4 feature) to apply a BitmapCache to any background that you may be animated things over. Also, make sure to share and freeze all the brushes you use.

If it's charting, drop down to DrawingVisuals instead of using Shapes or other higher level contstructs. You can also use GDI+ to draw into WriteableBitmaps as a last resort.

Also, dual-core Atoms will also provide a significantly smoother WPF UI in my experience. Try an Atom D510 or D525 if possible. They use much more power and give off more heat but the user experience improvement was worth it for my product.

And keep in mind that iOS apps are native code. WPF provides a much higher level of abstraction and much faster development at the expense of generally slower performance, especially when hardware resources are limited.

Answer 3

I've found that all GMA chipsets on XP have terrible WPF performance. Not only low framerates but terrible graphical glitching and artifacting. Surfaces will become see through, video surfaces become a garbled mess, mouse overs will become glitchy.

Our solution has been to disable hardware acceleration via a registry patch that we offer customers that have issues.