SciChart SDK v6 brings some exciting enhancements to the SciChart WPF 2D & 3D Chart control suite! We outline the main differences and features below.
Visual Xccelerator Engine for Massive Performance Enhancements
SciChart WPF SDK v6 features a completely new DirectX-powered 2D/3D rendering engine, which we're calling Visual Xccelerator. This engine replaces the SciChart.DirectX package which is now deprecated (see below).
SciChart SDK v6 with Visual Xccelerator brings you up to 100x performance improvements for various chart types and massive big-data performnce previously not possible with our WPF charts.
Visual Xccelerator Engine can be found in the SciChart Nuget package (SciChart.Drawing.dll).
The SciChart.DirectX package containing the Direct3D11RenderSurface and using SharpDX is now deprecated. You do not need to install this package to use Visual Xccelerator
What's Accelerated
- Line Series with Unsorted Xy Data are up to 1,401% faster!
- Scatter Series with Unsorted Xy data are up to 568% faster!
- Candlestick Series are up to 4,044% faster!
- OHLC Series are up to 11,512% faster!
- Column Series are up to 6,469% faster!
- Band Series are up to 10,240% faster!
- Mountain Series are up to 8,847% faster!
- Stacked Column/Mountain Charts are up to 469% faster!
- Big-data massive datasets now supported up to and exceeding 1 Billion Data-points for some chart types by using a number of intelligent caching and parallelisation techniques.
- Many Axis types including Linear now use GPU Shaders to perform axis transformations.
- All drawing operations now fully hardware accelerated, taking full advantage of the power of the GPU.
- Many algorithms and transformations within SciChart have been tuned for better throughout.
We've spared no expense to make SciChart SDK v6 the fastest WPF Chart in the world by completely overhauling the rendering pipeline. We hope you like what we've done and feedback (good or bad) is always welcome!
What's Not Accelerated
The old rendering / drawing path still exists in SciChart and SDK v6 is fully backward compatible with applications written for v5. There are some APIs however that we could not implement through the new path due to technical limitations. These are outlined below.
DiscontinuousDateTimeAxis
This axis type relies on a number of complex, non-linear calculations and so cannot be easily accelerated with the new engine. At the moment, any charts using this axis type drops down to the legacy drawing path, wihch still exists and works without change.
The CategoryDateTimeAxis, DateTimeAxis and NumericAxis are all fully accelerated options.
Ternary Charts
Due to the complexity of the visuals of these charts, Ternary Charts are not on the new Visual Xccelerator path. However, we have implemented a fully backward compatble way to draw these on the legacy rendering path.
Error Bars Charts
Similarly, Error Bars are not on the new Visual Xccelerator path. However, we have implemented a fully backward compatble way to draw these on the legacy rendering path.
Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements for SciChart SDK v6 with Visual Xccelerator have not changed, in fact if anything, we can now have better performance on even lower hardware specs. For optimum performance in the highest performance scenarios, a recommended hardware spec can be found below.
- Intel i7 2.8 GHz or better.
- 16 GB DDR4 RAM or better
- nVidia 1070 GTX or better
With Visual Xccelerator, the CPU usage and RAM usage of your applications with SciChart is more efficient than ever. We've gone to great lengths not only to improve performance, but to minimise resource usage, resulting in our fastest, and most efficient charts ever!
Best Practices
The Visual Xccelerator Engine is not enabled by default. To enable this, simply set the VisualXcceleratorEngine.IsEnabled attached property to true on a SciChartSurface. More info in the page on enabling the Visual Xccelerator Engine.
.NET Core 3.0 Support
SciChart SDK v6 brings you full .NET Core 3.0 support. Packages are distributed for .NET Framework and .NET Core separately in our installer, or packaged together in NuGet. For the best user experience, we recommend using NuGet Package References as this minimises the chance of referencing the wrong DLLs!
The minimum .NET Framework version has been raised to .NET 4.5.2, in line with current latest supported framework version by Microsoft. Due to a number of .NETCore enabled dependencies, we can no longer support .NET Framework versions earlier than 4.5.2.
Backward Compatibility / Deprecated APIs
We've made great efforts to ensure that SciChart SDK v6 is fully backward compatible with applications written in v5 (or even v4). For most applications, the usage of SciChart v6 will be a drop in replacement. If you encounter an issue, we have listed below any deprecated APIs or breaking changes to help you migrate. We can also provide application migration services should you require.
Deprecation of SciChart.DirectX package
Previously in SciChart SDK v5, the DirectX renderer or Direct3D11RenderSurface was hosted in the ScIChart.DirectX package. This package used SharpDX, an open source managed wrapper around DirectX, to allow hardware accelerated drawing in SciChart.
Announced recently, SharpDX has been deprecated by its author and is no longer being activately maintained. As a result, we have taken steps to develop our own in-house rendering engine which does not rely on SharpDX or any third party dependencies.
SciChart.DirectX is currently published for SDK v6 and will continue to be released alongside our releases of SciChart for a while, however we will no longer be actively maintaining the SciChart.DirectX package or fixing bugs in it going forward. It is therefore advisable for all customers to upgrade / migrate to the Visual Xccelerator engine as soon as possible.
Changes to Licensing Mechanism
We have a brand-new in-house cross-platform licensing mechanism rolling out across our WPF, iOS, Android charts, as well as future platforms. This involves using a new Cross-platform licensing wizard and the activation steps have changed slightly. For users of WPF you will find the activation/deactivation process very familiar. The trial process has changed slightly. Find out more in the Licensing SciChart pages.
All product keys for SciChart WPF v6 have changed and you will need to re-activate using the new keys, include new runtime keys in your application. Don't worry! If you are a customer of SciChart WPF with an active support subscription, we will issue you new keys for free. You can view updated license keys at www.scichart.com/profile and steps on how to activate / deactivate at Licensing SciChart WPF.
Deprecation of Activation for versions v3 - v5
Our licensing mechanism has a one-time developer activation procedure which in versions v3 to v5 of SciChart relied on a third party licensing component. The third-party licensing component vendor has sadly stopped maintaining their products and they are not compatible with .NET Core / .NET Standard.
At the moment we're able to host the legacy licensing/activation system in the cloud, but we cannot gaurantee we can do this forever, As a result, we recommend customers upgrade to SciChart SDK v6 for projects which are still undergoing active development where you need to activate or deactivate developer licenses.
Something else we need to do soon is switch over the Licensing Server to use HTTPS (we already use our own in-house encryption/hashing for usernames, passwords). When we do that, the SciChart WPF Licensing Wizard v3-5 will not be able to activate over the internet unless you update to the latest SciChart WPF Licensing Wizard v5.5. You will still be able to activate manually up to a three-PC limit as before.
Licensing in v3-v5 of SciChart relies on a now deprecated third party licensing component. We've taken steps to replace this with our own in-house system. The old activation system works for now if you are using versions v3-v5 of SciChart, however we recommend upgrading to v6 to avoid possible future interruptions in service.
For as long as possible we will maintain the old licensing & activation mechanism. This might be years, so no need to be concerned, however we need to make you aware of the possible changes in the future.
List of breaking API changes & how to solve
A list of breaking changes in the SciChart API from version 5 to 6 are included in the following page: Breaking change list.