How do you determine if WPF is using Hardware or Software Rendering?

wpf rendering pipeline
Charley Rathkopf picture Charley Rathkopf · Sep 29, 2008 · Viewed 31.1k times · Source

I'm benchmarking a WPF application on various platforms and I need an easy way to determine if WPF is using hardware or software rendering.

I seem to recall a call to determine this, but can't lay my hands on it right now.

Also, is there an easy, code based way to force one rendering pipeline over the other?

Answer

rudigrobler picture rudigrobler · Sep 29, 2008

Check RenderCapability.Tier

[UPDATE]

  • RenderCapability.IsPixelShaderVersionSupported - Gets a value that indicates whether the specified pixel shader version is supported.
  • RenderCapability.IsShaderEffectSoftwareRenderingSupported - Gets a value that indicates whether the system can render bitmap effects in software.
  • RenderCapability.Tier - Gets a value that indicates the rendering tier for the current thread.
  • RenderCapability.TierChanged - Occurs when the rendering tier has changed for the Dispatcher object of the current thread.

RenderCapability.Tier >> 16

  • Rendering Tier 0 - No graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is less than version 7.0.
  • Rendering Tier 1 - Partial graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is greater than or equal to version 7.0, and lesser than version 9.0.
  • Rendering Tier 2 - Most graphics features use graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is greater than or equal to version 9.0.

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