How do you determine if WPF is using Hardware or Software Rendering?

Question

I'm benchmarking a WPF application on various platforms and I need an easy way to determine if WPF is using hardware or software rendering.

I seem to recall a call to determine this, but can't lay my hands on it right now.

Also, is there an easy, code based way to force one rendering pipeline over the other?

Answer 1

Check RenderCapability.Tier

• Graphics Rendering Tiers
• RenderCapability Class

[UPDATE]

• RenderCapability.IsPixelShaderVersionSupported - Gets a value that indicates whether the specified pixel shader version is supported.
• RenderCapability.IsShaderEffectSoftwareRenderingSupported - Gets a value that indicates whether the system can render bitmap effects in software.
• RenderCapability.Tier - Gets a value that indicates the rendering tier for the current thread.
• RenderCapability.TierChanged - Occurs when the rendering tier has changed for the Dispatcher object of the current thread.

RenderCapability.Tier >> 16

• Rendering Tier 0 - No graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is less than version 7.0.
• Rendering Tier 1 - Partial graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is greater than or equal to version 7.0, and lesser than version 9.0.
• Rendering Tier 2 - Most graphics features use graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is greater than or equal to version 9.0.

Answer 2

.NET 4.0 provides the ability to force software rendering in code:

public partial class App : Application 
{    
    protected override void OnStartup(StartupEventArgs e)    
    {         
        if (WeThinkWeShouldRenderInSoftware())            
            RenderOptions.ProcessRenderMode = RenderMode.SoftwareOnly;    
    }
}

See this post for more information.

Answer 3

Based on the RenderingTier links, here is some code:

        logger.InfoFormat("WPF Tier = {0}",RenderCapability.Tier / 0x10000);
        RenderCapability.TierChanged +=
            (sender, args) => logger.InfoFormat("WPF Tier Changed to {0}",
                                                RenderCapability.Tier / 0x10000);

I'm still testing and working on this. See future edits/answers for what I find.