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WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

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Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#91

Post by dgellow »

Rohansi wrote: post #68
dgellow wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, Avalonia is fine. I meant specifically Microsoft offering

Why limit yourself to Microsoft's offerings? They've dropped the ball on all of their UI frameworks I don't see why anyone would trust them to build software on. Give it a few more years and MAUI will join the list of abandoned UI frameworks and another one will pop up

I was specifically talking about my frustration with Microsoft. MAUI was indeed pretty much on arrival, what a waste of the Xamarin name…

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#92

Post by adithyassekhar »

vitorgrs wrote: post #63
kristianp wrote: post #58

> benchmarks (like this one: https://github.com/Noemata/XamlBenchmark ), WinUI 3 is currently measurably slower than both WPF and UWP. WPF is 20+ years old and even it is not native!!!. Older stuff is generally faster because it had to be built in a more resource poor time. Maybe the WinUI devs should be forced to work on systems with the Minimum System Requirements. Heck, maybe all Microsoft development should be do…

If I recall right, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7/8 during the 2010's were all developed on low end devices. Both had huge issues UX wise, specially desktop, but performance and stability was never a issue. Developers should always test their system on the minimum system requirement that they allow the system to be installed... I remember I complained about WinUI performance years ago, and they told me at the time tha…

I am sure this was posted so many times before but someone should reverse engineer the windows 8 era windows phones. Those were ridiculously smooth compared to android and ios with just 512mb of ram.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#93

Post by CJefferson »

pjmlp wrote: post #89
antiloper wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I see the profiler data that shows AddRef/Release being a performance bottleneck?

Yes, learn to use one and point it to a C++ Github project full of shared pointers.

I don’t believe it’s Limiting factor in UI frameworks. I’ve profiled a lot of c++ and a lot of UI code. UI problems tend to come from too much churn and object creation, or doing too much work in the UI thread so it gets laggy, not just doing some reference counting.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#94

Post by Topfi »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #92
vitorgrs wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall right, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7/8 during the 2010's were all developed on low end devices. Both had huge issues UX wise, specially desktop, but performance and stability was never a issue. Developers should always test their system on the minimum system requirement that they allow the system to be installed... I remember I complained about WinUI performance years ago, and they told me at the time tha…

I am sure this was posted so many times before but someone should reverse engineer the windows 8 era windows phones. Those were ridiculously smooth compared to android and ios with just 512mb of ram.

WP was incredibly smooth and they were willing to reinvent UX from first principles in ways that'll to this day make me reach for Sailfish OS if I didn't need physical buttons, but I must bring up the desktop version of Windows from that day.

I'll never forget the Asus Netbook proudly boasting about its 1024MB of memory via a colorful sticker that'd be considered excessively large on a 17.3" workstation, somehow running Gimp with multiple layers on Windows 8 alongside a few Chrome tabs without a care in the world. UX of 8 and 8.1 was awful, but it was optimized and stable in ways that made me hopeful for what MSFT would deliver in the future. 1gig of memory, a spinning hard drive and a single low powered x86 core were enough to get some image editing for a then school course done with some wiki pages in the background. I'd hardly believe it, had I not lived it. 10 and 11 have been regressions in my book.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#95

Post by pjc50 »

drysart wrote: post #84
ChrisRR wrote: post #83

I'm stilll shocked that we're reinventining the wheel of things that were solved 20+ years ago, like UIs, and somehow making them massively more resource intensive

It's tempting to look at it that way; but that's being over-reductive. UIs of today are not the UIs of 20 years ago. Users expect much more from today's UIs, and UI toolkits necessarily get more complex as a result in order to deliver on those increased expectations. And if you don't agree, this is Windows we're talking about. Nothing's stopping you from creating your application with Win32 except for the fact that i…

> Users expect much more from today's UIs

.. and get much less. Especially in accessibility. We've lost things like ubiquitous accelerator keys and even basics like "being able to tell where the edges of controls are or which is the active window".

The only real advantage WinUI has over WinForms is "responsive" resizing and display scaling.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#96

Post by vintagedave »

drysart wrote: post #84
ChrisRR wrote: post #83

I'm stilll shocked that we're reinventining the wheel of things that were solved 20+ years ago, like UIs, and somehow making them massively more resource intensive

It's tempting to look at it that way; but that's being over-reductive. UIs of today are not the UIs of 20 years ago. Users expect much more from today's UIs, and UI toolkits necessarily get more complex as a result in order to deliver on those increased expectations. And if you don't agree, this is Windows we're talking about. Nothing's stopping you from creating your application with Win32 except for the fact that i…

What do they expect that WinUI provides that classic WinAPI UIs don't?

This is not a rhetorical question. I do see some things, like antialiased drawing, etc (GDI is outdated, but I'm not convinced newer drawing could not be added.) But in general the classic ones work, including with accessibility, and are highly functional and batle-tested.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#97

Post by perching_aix »

Out of sheer curiosity I gave it a quick "search" how one goes from client code instrumenting WinUI to then pixels appearing on the screen, and it seems like quite the indirection-ridden and generalized journey, which I fundamentally can't imagine being particularly cheap. Maybe it's just my unfamiliarity with this world though, never wrote a graphics application end-to-end (i.e. rasterization included) on my own.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#98

Post by reddalo »

electroly wrote: post #39
the__alchemist wrote: post #16

As someone who builds desktop apps: Is there any reason I would use this over something cross-platform like EGUI? I am kind of over software being OS-specific; this is one of the biggest compatibility mistakes we've made. Along with the related process of making drawing pixels on a display a complicated process!

Even if I wanted a Windows-specific UI, I still wouldn't choose WinUI 3. You can ignore it. At my day job, I choose Windows Forms with Blazor mixed in. That's old reliable Win32 tech + modern web tech, without any modern Windows tech mixed in.

Win32 is absolutely the best GUI system, you get the most clean, performant and easy-to-use results.

I wish Microsoft just sticked to Win32 instead of reinventing the wheel with worse solutions.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#100

Post by markus_zhang »

Topfi wrote: post #94
adithyassekhar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure this was posted so many times before but someone should reverse engineer the windows 8 era windows phones. Those were ridiculously smooth compared to android and ios with just 512mb of ram.

WP was incredibly smooth and they were willing to reinvent UX from first principles in ways that'll to this day make me reach for Sailfish OS if I didn't need physical buttons, but I must bring up the desktop version of Windows from that day. I'll never forget the Asus Netbook proudly boasting about its 1024MB of memory via a colorful sticker that'd be considered excessively large on a 17.3" workstation, somehow runn…

I never used 8 because I hate the UI. But I used 7 for a long time. I recall that 7 was blazingly fast on a 2GB notebook back in the early 2010x. But then that was already way beyond its minimum system requirement.
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