Which would be the best 2D graphics library?

Question

Okay, I bet this question might have been asked dozens of times before, but at the end of the day, I am still confused.

I am working on a charting/plotting application. My application will also have WinForms controls.

Edit: Actually it's little bit more than a simple charting application. I need to plot hundreds of symbols on the plot. Additionally, the plot will be interactive, e.g., selecting, moving or editing the symbols, adding/editing text on the chart itself. WPF seems to be answer as far as the replies are concerned, but I am still skeptic whether it will scale well. Any second opinions?

My current options are:

1. GdiPlus: Seems best, but does not supports hardware acceleration.
2. WPF: Practically, its still too slow.
3. SlimDX: Might be overkill
4. Tao: Don't know much yet
5. XNA: ditto

Since I plan to use Windows 7 features in my application, So this will be a blend of WinForms and custom graphics.

Any help or links comparing the above would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Of all those options, assuming you're discarding off-the-shelve control libraries for charting/graphing - WPF seems to be the easiest way to integrate any graphics with WinForms (if you can, why not go all the way and make everythingin WPF?).

Have you seen this famous WPF Graph Example here?

To give you an idea, I put something like 16 graphs on my desktop/laptop and it works very well. Also tried it out on embedded graphic cards (very small devices) and still I was able to render at a decent refresh rate up to 4 graphs simultaneously.

Before worrying about performance you really need to do some benchmarking on your spec.

Answer 2

Another one that might be worth checking out is the MS Chart controls.

There are also some Samples and screenshots here

Answer 3

We did this type of work for over 20 years now, and the story doesn't change at all.

As you see you haven't got much choice..

The truth is with the entire reluctance and work in graphics vendor wars where you will see for example NVidia cards horribly slow down all GDI+/WinForms code, requiring double-buffering hacks, and what not.

Not only is NVidia or MSFT 'reluctant' to address acceleration or fix issues, they insist on leaving them as is and introducing even slower and horribly painted ListViews, Grids, and much more.. They also sell lots of 'half-technical garbage' on their blogs and support on this issue for over 5 years now.

WPF sucks trunks, it bloats so fast and acts like an Atari pushing Unreal Tournmaent 3. As for approaching ironically-native focus and acceleration (as they should have understood from the beginning/doh!), MILCore is supposed to help a lot with Silverlight and slimmed down CLR. But nope, it doesn't, the browsers now feel like C64.

SlimDX and TAO are probably an overkill and for XNA you'll need widget and toolkits that are starting to spring up. If you even consider doing D2D and Windows 7 say goodbye to much of your audience that simply runs XP because it is around c20% faster and about 300% faster in GDI (classic, most hardware accelerated apps) and nothing WinForm/WPF can even compare close to it...

What you are getting involved in is a dirty part of the industry and one that is littered with politics, perf problems, bugs, stories and silence/reluctance when alternatives are presented. You can still interop into partially accelerated GDI bits, but the mixing of GDI+ and GDI causing other issues as well as bring further complication that has no good workarounds.

But to answer and in hope the above saves you time as it is a long history of it.. If you want good portability, 30 times better perf than WPF or WinForms, the best way forward is to use OpenGL and OpenTK and aim at 2D. You will still see the pathetic JIT-er drag itself at times and you will have some interop work cut out, but the difference in performance is astonishing (because if someone didn't hear, we got 300 times faster hardware, yet 50 times slower apps on .NET these days).

Lastly, use good algo-s not to overload that WPF or WinForms/GDI+ crap with too many points as it chokes so hard and fast on large data sets that kids smash it by 3x faster perf even on ARM/iPhone devices.

[piece to Seattle bloating camp]