Faster control drawing over background image

Question

Hi. I am developing a .net based touch screen control system for a very high spec race car transporter/motorhome. Because of the location of ths system, the background cannot be just the normal control colour, but is a gradual gradient including team logo etc etc... However, I desperately need to know if there is a way to speed up the drawing of normal controls (buttons dials etc) when using a background image. When each individual form appears on the screen, it takes it a couple of seconds to draw all the components ot the form. Not really acceptable. Remove the BGimage, and the drawing is sub half a second. The image is only 76k per form, and the size seems to make no difference to it, but it is full screen. Any GDI+ / Forms gurus out there that can help me with this problem, it is marring an otherwise very nice system!!! :-) Many thanks in advance Paul.

neil 0 · Answer

Not sure but here are a couple ideas to try: - Upgrade your hardware especially your graphics card. - Try a really small image size to test that theory of yours that image size does not matter. Something like all one color image. - If that works you can use a really good up to date photo editor to optimize the image. Try jpg and png. Crank up the compression with jpg. With png if you reduce the number of colors in the palette and run an optimizer you can get the image much smaller than a gif. Actually PhotoShop does only a fair job with png files. The png format has allot of potenial. - Don't use controls. Try just using Graphics and draw your own.