Vista - 3D Graphics

Could somebody comment the following quote from the SDK documentation: "3-D
support in Windows Presentation Foundation is not designed to provide a
full-featured game-development platform."

My question is - in what respect 3D graphics in Windows Presentation
Foundation is limited? I am not interested in game development, but I do
need to visualize some medical data in 3D. Is WPF suitable for this kind of
applications? The interactivity is minimal, but the scene complexity can be
substantial - tens or hundereds of thousands of faces. Currently we base our
development on VC6.0/MFC/OpenGL, but some features of WPF look quite
interesting to us.
Another question - if 3D engine in WPF is not suitable for some reason, what
are other options for integrating complex 3D graphics in WPF applications?
I've heard some rumours that OpenGL will be layered on top of DirectX and
its performance will not be great. I'd like very much to stay away from
DirectX programmign because of its complexity.

My experience:
I have created a 3D chess game, see http://www.valil.com/WinFX . I have
counted the number of faces of the meshes, there are 10,000 unique faces and
a total of 50,000 (the same mesh is used in many 3D models).
There are no complex animations and the interactivity is minimal (like your
project).The game is very smooth on a P4 2.8 GHz with GeForce FX 5200
(low-end graphic card).

And Avalon/WPF is not fully optimized yet, from what I know the API is now
more or less stable and the team is focusing now on fixing bugs and
performance improvements.

Hope this helps,
Valentin Iliescu

"rincewind" wrote:

> Could somebody comment the following quote from the SDK documentation: "3-D
> support in Windows Presentation Foundation is not designed to provide a
> full-featured game-development platform."
>
> My question is - in what respect 3D graphics in Windows Presentation
> Foundation is limited? I am not interested in game development, but I do
> need to visualize some medical data in 3D. Is WPF suitable for this kind of
> applications? The interactivity is minimal, but the scene complexity can be
> substantial - tens or hundereds of thousands of faces. Currently we base our
> development on VC6.0/MFC/OpenGL, but some features of WPF look quite
> interesting to us.
> Another question - if 3D engine in WPF is not suitable for some reason, what
> are other options for integrating complex 3D graphics in WPF applications?
> I've heard some rumours that OpenGL will be layered on top of DirectX and
> its performance will not be great. I'd like very much to stay away from
> DirectX programmign because of its complexity.
>
>
>

The main issues WPF 1.0 doesn't address are some of the 3D hardware features
like pixel shaders, vertex blending, and other 3D specific hardware features.

If you don't need pixel shaders and stuff, then WPF is for you. It can
render 100,000's of vertex points.

My Graph3D sample at http://www.therhogue.com/WinFX allows for the creation
of tons of obects based on live stock data. You can animate the objects and
hit test them. The sample was designed to push the platform. It's easy to
determine the vertex count - each cube is 8 vertex points. So just multiply
times the number of days and that is the count.

The code is available, and you can leverage it if you like. enjoy.


"rincewind" wrote:

> Could somebody comment the following quote from the SDK documentation: "3-D
> support in Windows Presentation Foundation is not designed to provide a
> full-featured game-development platform."
>
> My question is - in what respect 3D graphics in Windows Presentation
> Foundation is limited? I am not interested in game development, but I do
> need to visualize some medical data in 3D. Is WPF suitable for this kind of
> applications? The interactivity is minimal, but the scene complexity can be
> substantial - tens or hundereds of thousands of faces. Currently we base our
> development on VC6.0/MFC/OpenGL, but some features of WPF look quite
> interesting to us.
> Another question - if 3D engine in WPF is not suitable for some reason, what
> are other options for integrating complex 3D graphics in WPF applications?
> I've heard some rumours that OpenGL will be layered on top of DirectX and
> its performance will not be great. I'd like very much to stay away from
> DirectX programmign because of its complexity.
>
>
>