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WPF’s
resolution independence is a critical part of being ready for the future.
High-resolution displays are becoming increasingly common, so the ability to
adapt to this is very important. Part and parcel of this is the high
precision floating point representation used for all coordinates.
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Moreover,
WPF provides a set of graphics facilities that enable you to exploit the
power of the graphics hardware while being abstracted away from the
capabilities of the hardware. It will fall back to software rendering when
the services your application uses are not implemented in hardware, but will
exploit the hardware wherever possible, enabling you to make best use of the
computer’s capabilities. As the average graphical capabilities of machines
improve, your software will be ready to take advantage of this.
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One
thing to be aware of with the WPF 3D support is that it’s important to
prototype your design before committing to it, with a view to checking the
performance. Certain approaches to 3D can yield poor performance. In
particular, hit testing can get expensive for certain kinds of models. (Since
WPF allows you to modify any part of the model in any way at any time, it
can’t make all of the same performance optimizations for hit testing that 3D
games are able to, so it will tend to be at a natural disadvantage.)
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Of
course it’s currently a moving target, since only previews have shipped so
far. So be prepared to revisit your feasability studies when beta 2 ships.
(Most things should just get faster.)
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