Is Graphics.Drawimage Too Slow for Bigger Images

Is Graphics.DrawImage too slow for bigger images?

Yes, it is too slow.

I ran into this problem several years ago while developing Paint.NET (right from the start, actually, and it was rather frustrating!). Rendering performance was abysmal, as it was always proportional to the size of the bitmap and not the size of the area that it was told to redraw. That is, framerate went down as the size of the bitmap went up, and framerate never went up as the size of the invalid/redraw area went down when implementing OnPaint() and calling Graphics.DrawImage(). A small bitmap, say 800x600, always worked fine, but larger images (e.g. 2400x1800) were very slow. (You can assume, for the preceding paragraph anyway, that nothing extra was going on, such as scaling with some expensive Bicubic filter, which would have adversely affected performance.)

It is possible to force WinForms into using GDI instead of GDI+ and avoid even the creation of a Graphics object behind the scenes, at which point you can layer another rendering toolkit on top of that (e.g. Direct2D). However, it's not simple. I do this in Paint.NET, and you can see what's required by using something like Reflector on the class called GdiPaintControl in the SystemLayer DLL, but for what you're doing I'd consider it a last resort.

However, the bitmap size you're using (800x1200) should still work OK enough in GDI+ without having to resort to advanced interop, unless you're targeting something as low as a 300MHz Pentium II. Here are some tips that might help out:

• If you are using an opaque bitmap (no alpha/transparency) in the call to Graphics.DrawImage(), and especially if it's a 32-bit bitmap with an alpha channel (but you know it's opaque, or you don't care), then set Graphics.CompositingMode to CompositingMode.SourceCopy before calling DrawImage() (be sure to set it back to the original value after, otherwise regular drawing primitives will look very ugly). This skips a lot of extra blending math per-pixel.
• Make sure Graphics.InterpolationMode isn't set to something like InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic. Using NearestNeighbor will be the fastest, although if there's any stretching it may not look very good (unless it's stretching by exactly 2x, 3x, 4x, etc.) Bilinear is usually a good compromise. You should never use anything but NearestNeighbor if the bitmap size matches the area you're drawing to, in pixels.
• Always draw into the Graphics object given to you in OnPaint().
• Always do your drawing in OnPaint. If you need to redraw an area, call Invalidate(). If you need the drawing to happen right now, call Update() after Invalidate(). This is a reasonable approach since WM_PAINT messages (which results in a call to OnPaint()) are "low priority" messages. Any other processing by the window manager will be done first, and thus you could end up with lots of frame skipping and hitching otherwise.
• Using a System.Windows.Forms.Timer as a framerate/tick timer won't work very well. These are implemented using Win32's SetTimer and result in WM_TIMER messages which then result in the Timer.Tick event being raised, and WM_TIMER is another low priority message which is sent only when the message queue is empty. You're better off using System.Threading.Timer and then using Control.Invoke() (to make sure you're on the right thread!) and calling Control.Update().
• In general, do not use Control.CreateGraphics(). (corollary to 'always draw in OnPaint()' and 'always use the Graphics given to you by OnPaint()')
• I recommend not using the Paint event handler. Instead, implement OnPaint() in the class you're writing which should be derived from Control. Deriving from another class, e.g. PictureBox or UserControl, will either not add any value for you or will add additional overhead. (BTW PictureBox is often misunderstood. You will probably almost never want to use it.)

Hope that helps.

gdi+ Graphics::DrawImage really slow~~

You have a screen of 4000 x 3000 resolution? Wow!

If not, you should draw only the visible part of the image, it would be much faster...

[EDIT after first comment] My remark is indeed a bit stupid, I suppose DrawImage will mask/skip unneeded pixels.

After your edit (showing StretchDIBits), I guess a possible source of speed difference might come from the fact that StretchDIBits is hardware accelerated ("If the driver cannot support the JPEG or PNG file image" is a hint...) while DrawImage might be (I have no proof for that!) coded in C, relying on CPU power instead of GPU's one...

If I recall correctly, DIB images are fast (despite being "device independent"). See High Speed Win32 Animation: "use CreateDIBSection to do high speed animation". OK, it applies to DIB vs. GDI, in old Windows version (1996!) but I think it is still true.

[EDIT] Maybe Bitmap::GetHBITMAP function might help you to use StretchDIBits (not tested...).

Graphics.DrawImage alternatives for large images

Sounds to me you are focusing on the wrong problem. Painting the image is slow, not painting the "cross-hairs".

Large images can certainly be very expensive when you don't help. And System.Drawing makes it very easy to not help. Two basic things you want to do to make the image paint faster, getting it more than 20 times faster is quite achievable:

• avoid forcing the image painting code to rescale the image. Instead do it just once so the image can be drawn directly one-to-one without any rescaling. Best time to do so is when you load the image. Possibly again in the control's Resize event handler.

• pay attention to the pixel format of the image. The fastest one by a long shot is the pixel format that's directly compatible with the way the image needs to be stored in the video adapter. So the image data can be directly copied to video RAM without having to adjust each individual pixel. That format is PixelFormat.Format32bppPArgb on 99% of all modern machines. Makes a huge difference, it is ten times faster than all the other ones.

A simple helper method that accomplishes both without otherwise dealing with the aspect ratio:

private static Bitmap Resample(Image img, Size size) {
    var bmp = new Bitmap(size.Width, size.Height, System.Drawing.Imaging.PixelFormat.Format32bppPArgb);
    using (var gr = Graphics.FromImage(bmp)) {
        gr.DrawImage(img, new Rectangle(Point.Empty, size));
    }
    return bmp;
}

Graphics are too slow in my project

I don't think you are going to get any easy solutions. I can offer a few tips and opinions:

• You seem to be creating a new BitMap every time you paint the screen. This is definitely not a good idea, as large bitmaps are absolutely huge in terms of memory. What you probably want to do is create one when your game loads, and then simply clear it and repaint it at every frame. I think this is probably one of the bigger performance issues you have.
• There are a number of optimisations you could make afterwards. E.g. you are "rendering" the image that you will end up painting to the screen on the user interface thread. If the rendering process takes long, this will be noticeable. Typically this work happens on a background thread, and then the UI thread just checks if it can repaint using the new image. (I am simplifying things greatly here).
• For graphics intensive applications, WinForms is not a particularly good environment, as others have pointed out. You will not get any hardware acceleration at all. Moving to XNA is one option, but if your application is also quite rich in terms of standard WinForms screens and controls, this is probably not an easy option. Another suggested alternative might be WPF, where you might be able to get away with using transformations to move things around, which are hardware accelerated, and are not too dissimilar to a WinForms application (well, you don't need to implement your own buttons, etc).

Hope this helps a bit.

How to improve the performance of g.drawImage() method for resizing images

You can use ImageMagick to create thumbnails.

convert -define jpeg:size=500x180  hatching_orig.jpg  -auto-orient \
        -thumbnail 250x90   -unsharp 0x.5  thumbnail.gif

To use it from Java you can try JMagick which provides a Java (JNI) interface to ImageMagick. Or you can simply invoke the ImageMagick commands directly using Runtime.exec or ProcessBuilder.

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