Win2D VS ComputeSharp

For Windows only, Win2D!

You're looking for Win2D: https://github.com/microsoft/Win2D. It's the official D2D WinRT wrapper, supports UWP and WinUI, has seamless interior with XAML, it's very easy to use and has extensive interop APIs (even more so once we ship the next release) that give you maximum control if needed. I recommend checking it out 🙂

Your easiest bet is likely to use Win2D within UWP or WinUI 3, then you could just throw a CanvasControl as the root of your UI and draw whatever you want on it, including setting individual pixels. Alternatively an easy way to do that could be to use a WriteableBitmap in WPF/UWP/WinUI 3 just drawn into a root Border or something, and then you can easily manipulate pixels there. Of course, that'd be slower and not CPU accelerated, but still viable depending on your exact use case.

Alternatively you can also try Win2D, which is an official wrapper for D2D available for UWP and WinUI. You could use its CanvasAnimatedControl panel and then do your drawing from there, and just manually draw all your particles. The actual drawing would still be GPU accelerated, so it'd be relatively efficient (though less than using a custom shader, as you'd be queueing each particle from the CPU side).

To make a long story short, it's a UWP app since I've used DirectX 11 for drawing on the screen. I use C#, and I needed win2d (https://github.com/microsoft/Win2D)

Universal Windows Platform was introduced as the new hotness, but in my personal experience lacks a number of features from WPF I couldn't part with. It seems to have flopped a bit outside of applications developed by Microsoft. Projects that I though would bring features I really wanted (like win2d: GitHub - microsoft/Win2D) seem to have lost support. I'd hold off on this.

A couple other options than what has been suggested so far: - TerraFX.Interop.Windows. Raw, blittable, 1:1 bindings for all Win32, D2D/D3D11/D3D12 APIs (there's also a version with Vulkan bindings). As close to doing #include as you can get in C#. This is my personal favorite, I use it in my own ComputeSharp library, and transitively we use it in the Microsoft Store too 🙂 - Silk.NET another version of high-performance bindings, more opinionated than TerraFX and with some additional helpers to make it a bit easier to use.

A hello world .NET console app with NativeAOT is 1.08 MB. Goes down to 1.08 MB with some tweaking. Goes below 1MB with more tweaking. I have a fully self-contained NativeAOT sample app that renders some fancy animated shaders with DX12 that's about 2MB in size.

I dont think it's exactly what you're looking for, but I've found ComputeSharp to be a great C# GPU tool

Here's some: - MVVM Toolkit - PolySharp - ComputeSharp

If you don't mind being Windows only, I would also recommend trying out (shameless plug) ComputeSharp. You can find it on NuGet and it's available for UWP and WinUI 3 as well with ready to use XAML controls. The point is that it would allow you do your entire rendering via pixel/compute shaders, so it could basically run entirely on the GPU. That'd allow you to render even millions of particles with pretty good performance 🙂

Create a UWP or WinUI 3 applicaation and use the AnimatedComputeShaderPanel from ComputeSharp. The library lets you write shaders (ie. code to run on the GPU) entirely in C#, and handles all the logic to setup a DX12 animated swapchain, similar to Win2D. If you look at the repo you can also see a whole bunch of examples, which you can also try out for yourself. There's also several wiki pages with lots of info.