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Lightweight Text Rendering

Updated on Sep 30, 2025

The RadGridView control provides the functionality to use a lightweight rendering mode for the cells' text, which boosts the performance. To enable this functionality, set the EnableLightweightTextRendering property of RadGridView to true. This alternative rendering will skip the creation of TextBlock elements that are used to display the cells' text. Instead, it will use a faster drawing API, which draws the cells in a separate panel.

Enabling the lightweight rendering mode

XAML

    <telerik:RadGridView EnableLightweightTextRendering="True" GroupRenderMode="Flat"/>

Redraw Actions

The panel that is used for the lightweight rendering mode, will be forced to redraw when the following GridViewCell element's properties are changed:

FontSize
FontFamily
FontStyle
FontWeight
FontStretch
HorizontalContentAlignment
VerticalContentAlignment

Known Limitations

The lightweight text rendering is more performant, but it comes at the cost of some feature limitations. The following list shows some of the known features that are unsupported with the mode.

Merged cells are not supported with this rendering mode. If the merged cells functionality is enabled, a NotSupportedException will be raised.
Frozen columns are not supported with this rendering mode. Set the CanUserFreezeColumns property of RadGridView to False, in order to use the text rendering mode. Otherwise, a NotSupportedException will be raised.
The Nested option of the GroupRenderMode property does not support this rendering mode. Set the group render mode to Flat to use the text rendering mode. Otherwise, a NotSupportedException will be raised.
The ShowTooltipOnTrimmedText property of the columns does not support this rendering mode, as it relies on the TextBlock element of each the cell.
The CellTemplate or CellTemplateSelector properties of the columns will disable this rendering mode for their cells.
The ContentTemplate or ContentTemplateSelector properties of the GridViewCell element will disable this rendering mode.
The RightToLeft option the FlowDirection property will disable this rendering mode.