title: 2D Drawing Performance (GDI+ vs SlimDX)
body: <p>I am part of a team that has created a tool to view and interact with very large and heavily interconnected graphs in C#/WPF.  Viewing and interacting with the graph is done through a custom control that takes in a set of DrawingVisuals and displays them on a canvas.  Nodes in the graph may have a custom shape created with our editor.  The current control works very well and is fairly coupled with our program but there are legitimate worries about performance when considering much larger graphs (20,000+ nodes and lots of connection).</p>
  
  <p>After doing a bit of research it seems the two approaches are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>A GDI+ route where graphics are drawn to a WriteableBitmap or InteropBitmap.</li>
  <li>SlimDX or DirectX variant (hosted in a D3DImage)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><br>
  Given these two extremely different approaches which route would be best to take considering:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Interacting with the graph must be fast even while viewing the whole graph.</li>
  <li>Updating the visuals should be fast (color or size change)</li>
  <li>Hit testing must be fast (point and rectangle).</li>
  <li>Development must be completed in a timely manner.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Which method would you use and why?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: <br>
  It looks like a <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9529087/displaying-2d-schematics-in-wpf-with-drawing-visuals">similar question</a> was asked but not answered.</p>