Artifacting on Vista

Last week tech support kept telling us that Vista users were reporting really weird artifacts in the Launcher and our Preferences windows:

Since those two windows are layered windows, and layered windows have had performance problems in Vista until .NET 3.5 SP1, I wondered about it and stumbled on this MSDN article:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration

DWORD

The disable hardware acceleration option enables you to turn off hardware acceleration for debugging and test purposes. When you see rendering artifacts in an application, try turning off hardware acceleration. If the artifact disappears, the problem might be with your video driver.

The disable hardware acceleration option is a DWORD value that is either 0 or 1. A value of 1 disables hardware acceleration. A value of 0 enables hardware acceleration, provided the system meets hardware acceleration requirements; for more information, see

After spending some time convincing Tech Support to have the users try setting this registry key, forcing software rendering in WPF took care of the rendering problems. So we had the users update their graphics card drivers and hardware acceleration worked again.

So if you are not running on .NET 3.5 SP1 and see artifacts and rendering problems in layered windows on Vista, force software rendering to see if the issue might be caused by a bug in the graphics card’s driver.

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Tags: artifacting, layered-windows, software rendering

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