VS2010 Performance and Bad Video Drivers/Hardware

[Note, this post is superceeded by a newer post here.]

We’ve received a few performance complaints around Visual Studio 2010 (Beta 2) performance that can be traced to old video drivers or GPU virtualization issues.

If you’re seeing slow / broken screen updates verify you have the latest drivers for your system. If this doesn’t resolve your rendering issues, you may be able to work around the problem by forcing software emulation mode by changing one registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics]

"DisableHWAcceleration"=dword:00000001

As you can probably guess, this can be undone with:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics]

"DisableHWAcceleration"=dword:00000000

If you have these issues, please, let me know by either posting here or preferably by e-mailing DevPerf@Microsoft.com with details about the problems you are/were seeing. (When you e-mail, please run DXDIAG first and attach the DXDIAG.TXT file. This will give us a lot of information about your system, including what drivers you’re running.)

We’re very interested in finding any hardware/software incompatibilities we might have missed and getting them cleaned up.

If you do find you need to use software emulation, and then get new drivers or hardware later, don’t forget to switch software emulation back off so you can benefit from the improved performance.

Note that this will impact all WPF applications on the system, not just Visual Studio.

Regards,

Dave Berg
Developer Division Performance Team