Fastest way to paint a single moving image on a > 5000x3000 desktop?

Question

I'm dealing with software that frequently (almost exlusively) runs on computers boasting resolutions of over 5000x3000 pixels.

On such large displays, we needed a way to show the user where their mouse is. We looked in to making the actual cursor larger, but this seems to be impossible on Windows; instead, we've decided that on a certain keypress we would create a transparent form the size of the desktop, and on that we would draw a MouseCursor.png file that would refresh itself every 40-100ms.

However, on such a large canvas it does not work as responsively as we would like. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to tackle such an issue?

Answer 1

The mouse cursor is displayed with a hardware feature, a video overlay. Very difficult to compete with that feature in software.

Control Panel + Mouse, Pointers tab. If the "extra large" variety isn't good enough and the "Display pointer trails" option on the Options tab isn't helpful either then you still have a Browse button to load your own .cur files.