DataGridView performance - does it depend on the video card?

Question

I have a C#/.Net application which seems to use most of it's CPU time doing updates to a DataGridView. I manually update the data about every 1.5 seconds, updating only the data that has changed. This ends up being about 250 updates every 1.5 seconds. I'd like to reduce that 1.5 seconds to a much smaller number (0.5 seconds maybe). I've profiled and optimized as much as I can, and while the performance is ok, I'd like it to be faster.

My question is, will upgrading the video card from an Nvidia FX1800 to an Nvidia FX3800 produce a significant speedup?

Answer 1

GDI+ operation doesn't depend much of graphic CPU since it uses only basic accelerated operation that every graphic card supports (lines, rectangles, etc.).

I would guess that problem here is that you are not "hiding" control during updates. Check BeginUpdate/EndUpdate methods if they are available. If not, setting visible to false, updating and setting visible to true can sometime solve problem.

Answer 2

Your time is almost certainly not being spent in drawing the screen, but in updating the internal representation of the data, so no that won't help.

EDIT:

To find out where the time IS being spent, look into a profiler. I personally prefer the one from Red Gate

Answer 3

My gut says "No."

CPU time is not GPU time. If your CPU is busy updating the view, you might need to change the system to a more CPU friendly view. It sounds like it is not lazy loaded and is getting all of the data and all of the updates. How big is your range of values? If you do not have many values, this could be fine. My suspicion is that you have a large number of values and it is maintaining the entire list in memory. This is bad for a few reasons. It takes a lot of memory, you need to pay attention to all of the changes (not just the ones that affect your current display), it is a lot of content to shift around and update.

I would look for a more friendly control that only loads part of the data.

The graphics card that you have should be able to render the view in a very small fraction of a second. Try grabbing the application and wildly moving it around the screen. This will give you an indication of how quickly it can be updated (yes, not entirely accurate since it is probably being cached).

How big is your list?

Jacob

Answer 4

I used a DataGridView presenting a list of 1000 items in an application where the data (and by that, I mean the whole list) is refreshed every 50ms with almost no performance penalties. So I don't believe that what you want to do is too much for the DataGridView.
As Eric J. suggests, you should profile your code, I'm sure you'll find that your performance problem comes from somewhere else in the code.