How to get Windows Phone 7 emulator to use hardware acceleration?

Question

I'm running the Windows Phone 7 dev tools on an older MacBook Pro, with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card with 256MB of memory (not sure if it is shared or not) and I get lots of stuttering in the animations on the emulator, even simple ones, so I assume that it's not using my graphics hardware. The framerate counters are always at something like 002 or 003 (and red).

According to this post on the Windows Phone forums, these are the requirements:

"DirectX 10 capable card with a WDDM 1.1 driver is needed to take advantage of GPU acceleration on the Windows Phone Emulator for a Silverlight® application"

From running DxDiag, my card supports DirectX 10 and WDDM 1.1, I've installed the latest download of the tools from create.msdn.com, and the latest drivers from NVIDIA.

This is happening on a clean install of Windows 7.

I was able to run an empty XNA Windows Phone game without the error message mentioned here, so maybe it is using hardware acceleration after all, but the normal Silverlight stuff is really jerky.

What can I do to get the emulator graphics to run at a decent speed?

Answer 1

You should check this post