Fast pixel drawing

hi!
i wondered if there was a way i can draw pixels on a 640x480 form and reach framerates up to 100+ FPS?
i've been doing this with C++ and SDL and i reached the maximum framerate. is there an efficient way to plot pixels in c# with pointers on a form?
speed has most importance on this.

thanks in advance :)

Use a graphics api like DirectX or OpenGL?

there hadnt been any need to ask if it was that easy...

i want to port my software renderer to C# originaly written in SDL (c++). i don't need any SDL since it does not seem to be the right solution.

so if software pixel drawing is as fast as DirectX pixel drawing, i want to do it in software, otherwise how should i do it in directx? any samples?

if speed is the major concern why are you using software rendering in the first place let alone porting to c#? Thats just making a bad problem worse.

Keep a copy of the pixels in a flat array. Process, write, process, write. It doesn't get much faster than that.

i'm writing a _software_ renderer just to do it. it has no further use but to be proud of doing it in software :P
so Sebastiani, how do i handle this pixel writing stuff? i basically need a pointer or an array of 4-byted-colors to write my data to and a flip function. but how?

i tried it with directdraw, but couldnt really get a grip on that :(

Use LockBits and GDI to do your drawing.

Using the LockBits method to access image data

If you want fast pixel drawing then do not use C#.

i know how to draw pixels on a bitmap with bitmapdata and lock, but thats not fast, it is very slow. what i'm looking for is some realtime 100-fps drawing on a form...

ok. it seems fairly fast when I use a picturebox with a bitmap and a pointer to the image.
if you have any idea how to get this even faster, post it here :)

thanks.

Use a language that allows you lower-level access or use your language of choice the way in which it was designed to be used.

You are not supposed to do low level pixel manipulation with C# b/c it is abstracted into a much higher level object like an image. Anytime you try to do low-level pixel manipulation in C# it is going to be slow b/c it was not designed for that.

The whole point of C# is to hide the nitty gritty from you. Whether you agree with that or not is a moot point but if you do not like that you can switch to C++. Personally I find C# is very good for GUI but if you are trying to do something more complex like this you will run into many issues.

EDIT:
You could look into XNA in windowed mode for what you want. However I do not know much about XNA so I cannot give you any further advice about it. You may have better luck at some other forums regarding XNA. Gamedev has a lot of C# XNA devs so you might want to try over there.