Should I use Direct3D or just Windows GDI for a fancy/high-perf Win32 app UI? [closed]

Question

Looking for the right general approach for making a UI really snappy.

I'm thinking of developing a UI tool that might go beyond just some "in house" tool. It would involve elaborate and custom 2d elements and would need to support fast scrolling of a big virtual surface, which would likely entail redrawing tons of custom things really quickly.

I've done some GDI programming back when XP was new, and I ran into some perf issues with lots of full screen blitting (it was a slow computer anyway). I understand GDI has some degree of acceleration, but I have difficulty ascertaining what exactly I can expect to be accelerated here.

I've only used Direct3D in games. Is it reasonable to make D3D to power a windowed GUI application? Also, if I use D3D, do I have to do everything from scratch, or can I make some kind of GDI/D3D hybrid, for example, using Direct3D calls inside WM_PAINT or something, in order to leverage some Win32 stuff like menu bars or listboxes side-by-side with a panel full of D3D rendered stuff? Does anyone have an example of mixing D3D with Win32 gui junk? Or is this not really the right approach?

What do programs like AutoCad or 3ds Max or Photoshop, or other major Win32 applications with similarly elaborate UI's do?

Answer 1

If your GUI involves 3D manipulation of 3D scenes, Direct3D or OpenGL would probably be a win. If you are just trying to give your GUI a "non-boring" look where the controls are stylized and drawn with alpha blended bitmaps and so-on, then you're best sticking to the traditional windowing system (i.e. GDI) as the bottom-most rendering layer. However, the easiest way to achieve such a "look and feel" is to use a higher-level toolkit like wxWidgets or Qt in order to achieve the theming and customization that will make your GUI look "modern" and not like a boring corporate application.

Another option is to use XAML/WPF from a native application and use the tools that are available for creating XAML-based GUIs like Microsoft's Expression. I haven't explored that myself, but it should be feasible using the technique from this article in the March, 2013 issue of MSDN Magazine.