Cellular Automaton on WPF

Question

Hi, currently im taking a Master degree course in Computer Sciences, and i´d like to implement a Cellular Automata in WPF. The rendering performance must be enough to display a lattice (grid) containing 200,000 cells.

Since updating visuals is very slow in WPF (due to the visual and logical tree), maybe it's better to use old good Picturebox (GDI+) to do the rendering and WPF to implement the rest of the software. A second option would be to use pixel shaders (HLSL), but i'dont know if WPF supports multi-pass shaders.

Let me know what you think.

Answer 1

First, check out the WriteableBitmap. The performance is decent, but nowhere near a shader can provide. I'm not exactly sure what kind of shaders are supported, but I'd think it wouldn't be limited...

Found this over on WindowsClient, it doesn't seem like multipass shaders are supported currently. Again, its probably just a matter of time and demand on that code; it may have been added since the article was written.

Somebody +1 me for not mentioning the Game of Life.