Parnassus

A few days ago I posted about FireMonkey’s choice of canvas classes, where it would choose to render via GDI+ instead of via Direct2D.  There were two fixes: one (untested and possibly dangerous) enabled hardware rendering on DirectX9-class hardware, but required editing the FireMonkey source; the second (known safe and tested) enables optimised software rendering via WARP when DirectX10 hardware support is not available.  This last isn’t as good when you have DX9 hardware, but it doesn’t required editing any FireMonkey source and WARP renders surprisingly fast – it’s certainly good enough for 2D/HD applications.This code is now available as a unit you can include in your FireMonkey apps.  It is ifdef-ed so it will only function on Windows when compiled with XE4 and XE5. (Thanks to commenter Skamradt in the original post for suggesting this.) That means you can include and use it when compiling for OSX or Android without having to worry about it not compiling on those platforms, and that it will also only apply for known IDE / RTL versions that require this patch.  I have only briefly tested it on XE4 (where it works) and XE2 (where of course it doesn’t, but compiles anyway.)  Suggestions / changes are welcome.To use it, add the unit to your .dpr file and then add a call to TryUseDirect2D before Application.Initialize, like so:

• You can find the unit here.
• It’s MPL licensed, so useable in both commercial and open-source software.
• It makes a big speed difference for FireMonkey apps on my Windows 7, non-DirectX-10-hardware.  It should make a noticeable difference for anyone on a recently patched (with the Platform Update) Vista or 7 without DirectX10 hardware, which includes those running Windows in a virtual machine like Fusion.