Hello, I realise there are numerous questions on here asking about choosing between XNA and SlimDX, but these all relate to game programming.

A little background: I have an application that renders scenes from XML descriptions. Currently I am using WPF 3D and this mostly works, except that WPF has no way to render scenes offscreen (i.e. on a server, without displaying them in a window), and also rendering to a bitmap causes WPF to fallback to software rendering.

So I'm faced with having to write my own renderer. Here are the requirements:

• Mix of 3D and 2D elements.
• Relatively few elements per scene (tens of meshes, tens of 2D elements).
• Large scenes (up to 3000px square for print).
• Only a single frame will be rendered (i.e. FPS is not an issue).
• Opacity masks.
• Pixel shaders.
• Software fallback (servers may or may not have a decent gfx card).
• Possibility of being rendered offscreen.

As you can see it's pretty simple stuff and WPF can manage it quite nicely except for the not-being-able-to-export-the-scene problem.

In particular I don't need many of the things usually needed in game development. So bearing that in mind, would you choose XNA or SlimDX? The non-rendering portion of the code is already written in C#, so want to stick with that.