Performance of DrawingVisual vs Canvas.OnRender for lots of constantly changing shapes

Question

I\'m working on a game-like app which has up to a thousand shapes (ellipses and lines) that constantly change at 60fps. Having read an excellent article on rendering many mo

Answer 1

From Pro WPF in C# 2008:

The problem posed by these applications isn't the complexity of the art, but the sheer number of individual graphic elements. Even if you replace your Path elements with lighter weight Geometry objects, the overhead will still hamper the application's performance. The WPF solution for this sort of situation is to use the lower-level visual layer model. The basic idea is that you define each graphical element as a Visual object, which is an extremely lightweight ingredient that has less overhead than a Geometry object or a Path object.

What it boils down to is that every single one of those ellipses and lines you're creating is a separate FrameworkElement; that means it supports not only hit testing, but also layout, input, focus, events, styles, data-binding, resources, and animation. That's a pretty heavy-weight object for what you're trying to do! The Visual object skips all of that and inherits directly from DependencyObject. It still provides support for hit-testing, coordinate transformation, and bounding-box calculations, but none of the other stuff that the shapes support. It's far more lightweight and would probably improve your performance immensely.

EDIT:

Ok, I misread your question the first time around.

In the case that you are using OnRender, it really depends how you are creating the visuals and displaying them. If you are using a DrawingContext and adding all of the visuals to a single element, this is no different than using the DrawingVisual approach. If you were creating a separate element for each Visual created, then this would be a problem. It seems to me that you are doing things the right way.