CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wpfwinformsxaml
Peter Gfader
Peter Gfader

Reputation: 7741

Performance comparison of Winforms and WPF

Since XAML gets compiled, there should be no difference in execution of code like this.
Winforms (code like):

Form formPeter = new Form();
Textbox textbox = new Textbox();
Label l1 = new Label1();

Xaml does not get parsed at runtime, as I thought... :-)

But what about rendering/execution of big forms with lot of controls? Which technology is faster?

Upvotes: 17

Views: 15815

Answers (4)

Javier Cañon
Javier Cañon

Reputation: 162

WPF vs Winforms performance is no longer a major criterion.

I know this question has been asked before, but in view of .NET 4.x and the improvements that have gone into making WPF more performant, does the community think that performance is no longer a criteria for choosing one technology over another.

Overall WPF desktop applications performs significantly better than equivalent WinForms code, in scenarios that require a sophisticated UI, styles customization, and graphics-intensive scenarios, due to several architectural advantages of WPF over WinForms:

  • Better use of the GPU
  • Retained mode rendering
  • More efficient data binding More efficient object tree construction
  • More efficient RAM usage (using DependencyObject)
  • Smaller program code

However both perform sufficiently fast that I don't think performance will be the big reason to choose WPF over WinForms. It will be the ability to create better applications faster.

Game developers and others who need ultimate performance won't be using WPF or WinForms for the critical portions of their UI: They will be programming to Direct3D or even to the hardware.

This article describes the platforms (UWP, WPF, and Windows Forms) and helps you determine the best one for your application.

For Winforms Unit Testing, the first thing you would do, is to ensure that you have proper separation of your business logic from your form. Basically, using an MVC pattern. Then, you can easily test everything outside the form, as if the form didn't even exist.

Upvotes: 1

ima
ima

Reputation: 8265

WPF drawing is much faster, but objects are heavier. If you throw in 1000 separate buttons, it will be crawling. On the other hand, those buttons can have complex transparency and gradients without significant performance hit.

Upvotes: 3

Joseph Cooney
Joseph Cooney

Reputation: 236

Which Technology is faster? I'm afraid your question doesn't really have a simple answer.

Your comment about XAML not being parsed at runtime is both true and false. While the XAML is not parsed a normalized binary version of it (embedded as a resource in your application) called BAML is parsed at runtime. To say DirectX is faster than GDI is also something of a simplification - WPF and GDI-based rendering technologies just have different performance characteristics. For example WPF uses a retained rendering mode, whereas WinForms and other GDI-based technologies do not. WPF objects tend to be much heavier-weight because they support many many many more properties than their winforms counterparts. We have decades of knowledge on how to make GDI go pretty fast, and only a relatively short time with WPF and XAML.

WPF is sufficiently fast for writing applications, but you need to be constantly vigilant that your element count doesn't blow out (by creating overly complicated templates for example, and then having them repeated hundreds or thousands of times in your UI). Also WPF performs differently on different graphics hardware (since it calls down to DirectX internally). 2D content should be fine in WPF, even if it is totally rendered in software (say the way it would on a virtual machine) but animated, anti-aliased 3D with lots of elements requires real GPU power. As time moves on and graphics hardware becomes more powerful and prevalent and knowledge about how to performance-tune WPF improves we should see WPF pull further ahead (assuming it is slightly so now...for some scenarios...sometimes). So I guess the answer is "it depends".

Upvotes: 22

amazedsaint
amazedsaint

Reputation: 7642

WPF uses DirectX for rendering (which is much faster) instead of the native Windows GDI.

As you might already know, Native GDI is bitmap based. As WPF is vector based, WPF can make use of hardware support, in a much better way when compared to GDI.

How ever, the decision to choose WPF or Winforms heavily depends on other factors as well - The flexibility you need in the UI, how much media support your application needs etc. WPF is not a replacement for a Winforms - and it is not a silver bullet for all the problems.

With more hardware acceleration features coming up, WPF can deliver much better than your Winform applications.

A couple of interesting blogs I read ealier.

John's Post

Rob's Post

Upvotes: 6

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