>I'd guess that both options that are available here relate to WPF as used by the IDE.
>
>'Enable rich client visual experience' will, if checked, use 'pretty' WPF styles (color gradients, animations etc).
>'Use graphics accelerator' (sic) will allow WPF to handoff rendering to hardware if a suitable adaptor is available.
>
>I just looked at what the 'automatic' settings were on two different machines here.
>On the higher-end machine both options were selected when I chose 'Automatic'.
>On the other machine only 'rich client' was selected.

On my laptop it didn't have the "Use graphics accelerator" checked ... although I thought my laptop had that.

>I'm not sure where I should be looking for an improvement (or degradation) when manually overriding what VS decides.
>Certainly turning off 'rich client' should improve performance in all cases - but I see no noticeable difference on my machines.

I un-checked mine too. I don't know if it improved any, but I don't have another machine to compare to.

>Equally, I'd suspect, turning on 'Use hardware if available' should be checked - if it is *not* checked in automatic mode I'd assume it thinks no suitable hardware is onboard.

I now have only that one checked and we'll see if it speeds things up any.

~~Bonnie


>
>One obvious reason to turn off 'rich client' is if you are accessing VS over TS or any RDT.
>I also see that if 'Use hardware' is turned on VS still automatically reverts to software rendering in a RDT environment.
>
>One last thing: annoyingly the descriptive text in the 'Visual Experience' group does not update until you save you changed settings and re-open the Options window.....