Win2D VS Veldrid

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.

I'd recommend Veldrid

So, for example, Veldrid, a low cross-platform graphics API-agnostic rendering and compute library for .NET, has its own bindings to provide different graphics backends. How were those created? Is it a completely manual process? are tools available? How are those maintained?

https://github.com/mellinoe/veldrid and https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET are nice wrappers around several graphic apis

Check out Veldrid.

Veldrid is a lower level engine that abstracts away a bunch of backends for you. Youll have to build your own pieces on top.

Also noteworthy: Veldrid

in addition to what everyone has said already, take a look at https://github.com/mellinoe/veldrid

Veldrid for graphics although I think SILK.net would also work well.

If you’re interested in C#, You could look into Veldrid. It is 3D however, so im not sure how easy it is to do 2D with it. ImGui.NET is a set of .NET bindings for Dear ImGui, which is one of the best immediate mode gui librarys out there imo. It has a canvas feature which allows you to draw 2D shapes via the gui renderer. Also, the creator of Veldrid and ImGui.NET has an example project for ImGui.NET using veldrid..

Veldrid attempts to wrap several graphics api, directx11, metal, opengl, and vulkan. You would have to write most things from scratch but this lib will work cross platform. Probably not consoles though.