Drawing without flickering

c++ winapi drawing flicker
blejzz picture blejzz · Sep 21, 2011 · Viewed 9k times · Source

I have a win32 application which was developed in c++. The application draws some stuff on the window using basic shapes (rectangles). The windows is repainted every 20ms (50hz) using InvalidateRect. All works well but the drawing is flickering. How can i prevent the flickering? In c# i normally use a double buffered component (such as pictureBox), how could i get rid of this in c++ using win32?

Answer

macbirdie picture macbirdie · Sep 21, 2011

You can create an in-memory device context, draw those shapes to it (just like you would to the window's device context) and then blit from it to window's device context when the window is invalidated.

You also need to disable background clearing (handle WM_ERASEBKGND window message appropriately) before the draw happens.

Edit: I stumbled upon a pretty exhaustive tutorial on flicker-free drawing in GDI, which explains all aspects of drawing in Windows and comes with examples.

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