OpenInsight and Direct2D

OpenInsight 10 provides the option to use Direct2D rendering when painting windows and controls on the screen. If you are not familiar with Direct2D it is a new graphics engine Microsoft introduced with Windows 7 that aims to replace the traditional GDI graphics interface that has been part of Windows. Essentially it is a hardware-accelerated API that takes advantage of modern GPUs to provide high-performance rendering of 2D geometry, bitmaps and text.

By default OpenInsight will use Direct2D if it is available on the platform (usually Windows 7, Windows 8 and Vista SP2) unless you override this via the /2D switch or the UseD2D option to turn it off. You can also disable it a runtime by using the SYSTEM object's D2D property, which takes a simple boolean value of 1 or 0.

Of course you are probably asking why you would want to disable this? In most cases you should not, however not all graphics cards are created equal (or at least their drivers are not) and it is nice to have the option to drop back to standard GDI rendering in case you ever run into a problem. We have also found it useful during our own development cycle to see how the system behaves when Direct2D is not available, such as running on an XP platform.