Question

I’ve put off WPF development for a quite a while but, I’m finally thinking of moving ahead. I understand that WPF is totally new rendering “mechanism” which uses the GPU power (am I right?) unlike the CPU power that Winforms took up. If I’m not mistaking, this level of GPU support comes with Aero and therefore, a WPF app should run at full performance only in a Aero environment. Is this correct?
I mean, if I run a WPF (with lots of animations and glass) it will not run as well on a Win 7 Home Basic or XP, would it?

Answer 1

WPF use DirectX as renderer, it isn’t related to Aero. It works hardware accelerated on Windows XP too.
As long as the GPU on the machine is fast enough it will run all the effects you want.