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> I wish Microsoft had improved and advanced GDI instead of starting anew with WPF The improved and advanced technology you’re describing is called GDI+. There
by Const-me 10y ago
> I wish Microsoft had improved and advanced GDI instead of starting anew with WPF
The improved and advanced technology you’re describing is called GDI+. There’re things like anti-aliasing and alpha-blending implemented there. They work fine, but for compatibility reasons, it still renders on CPU.
Those years (mid-‘00s) there was a trend towards high-resolution displays, at that time it meant FullHD, driven by HD-DVD/BluRay. And a trend from desktops to laptops. It was already obvious GPU rendering was inevitable. The CPU and GPU are just fundamentally different. Hence the new GPU-centric technology.
> GDI and Win32 are so heavily intertwined
True, those two are coupled very tight.
There’s a good reason for that: performance. Win32 API largely based on Win16. And Windows 1.0 was running on systems like Intel 8088 4.77MHz, 640kB RAM. There wasn’t enough resources for better abstractions.