I've taken part in some WPF application development and I think there are some benefits in immediate-mode rendering of the UI. Particularly when the UI changes faster than a monitor refresh rate or there's too much data complexity and you want the data update and redraw processes to be independent.
For my first example, updating controls and overall layout in a WPF application feels much more lightweight than in WinForms because the renderer just shows the result at the next monitor refresh instead of trying to update the layout in realtime or using hacks that disable redraw until you do everything.
For the second example, I've used SciChart to display trading data and it again was much more responsive because it replaced a control-based rendering pipeline with just an immediate-mode canvas tgat would render the selected data window once per monitor refresh rate.
And I think overall once you hit the performance barrier where you can't just fill a panel with controls and let them render and instead have to make a custom draw routine, the immediate-mode rendering adds this extra smoothness to the UI and gives you a bit more performance headroom.
For my first example, updating controls and overall layout in a WPF application feels much more lightweight than in WinForms because the renderer just shows the result at the next monitor refresh instead of trying to update the layout in realtime or using hacks that disable redraw until you do everything.
For the second example, I've used SciChart to display trading data and it again was much more responsive because it replaced a control-based rendering pipeline with just an immediate-mode canvas tgat would render the selected data window once per monitor refresh rate.
And I think overall once you hit the performance barrier where you can't just fill a panel with controls and let them render and instead have to make a custom draw routine, the immediate-mode rendering adds this extra smoothness to the UI and gives you a bit more performance headroom.