Graphics performance improvement / GDI alternative?

Question

can anyone suggest any alternative to GDI? The reason is that I have data that updates rapidly and GDI doesn't support that kind of render velocity... I've tried SharpDX & SlimDX, but none seems to work properly (can't force them to draw on form without errors)

Update 1: I'm developing in C#

Update 2: Data is binded to Visual Studio 2010 default Charts control. A lot of code has been written to add functionality & lags were discovered after large amount of data incoming. Reason is that I need compatibility with .NET Framework 4 & Windows XP and higher. After spending a lot of time investigating, I've discovered that SlimDX and SharpDX have strict requirements to videocard, drivers, and problems running on Windows XP.

Answer 1

GDI is software only rendering, as well as GDI+ which handles alpha channel for transparency rendering. These two libraries are really limited and slow compared to a GPU based one.

My suggestion is that you should invest the time to implement a SharpDX Direct2D based drawing engine. I never heard about the issue you talked about with forms, I use SharpDX with Winforms and WPF and everything's going great!

If speed is the most important criteria, then you'll have to invest time into a GPU based rendering engine, GDI is way to slow and not adapted to real-time rendering.

Answer 2

Honestly I find it strange that GDI doesn't suffice in that context but there are a lot of alternatives: you could go for DirectDraw for complete power, GDI+ for more advanced manipulations and options, or even external softwares like GTK+.