Of
course, the software alternative may be much slower, so you??™ll find that computers with older
video cards won??™t run rich WPF applications very well, especially ones that incorporate complex
animations or other intense graphical effects. In practice, you might choose to scale down
complex effects in the user interface, depending on the level of hardware acceleration that??™s
available in the client (as indicated by the RenderCapability.Tier property).
nNote The goal of WPF is to offload as much of the work as possible on the video card so that complex
graphics routines are render-bound (limited by the GPU) rather than processor-bound (limited by your computer??™s
CPU). That way, you keep the CPU free for other work, you make the best use of your video card, and
you are able to take advantage of performance increases in newer video cards as they become available.
CHAPTER 1 n INTRODUCING WPF 3
WPF TIERS
Video cards differ significantly. When WPF assesses a video card, it considers a number of factors, including
the amount of RAM on the video card, support for pixel shaders (built-in routines that calculate per-pixel
effects such as transparency), and support for vertex shaders (built-in routines that calculate values at the
vertexes of a triangle, such as the shading of a 3-D object).
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