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DirectDraw wasn't a 2D graphics package; you probably mean GDI/GDI+. These libraries were used at at much smaller resolutions (1024x768, but fullscreen was push
by Jasper_ 7y ago
DirectDraw wasn't a 2D graphics package; you probably mean GDI/GDI+. These libraries were used at at much smaller resolutions (1024x768, but fullscreen was pushing it, your window was smaller). GDI could roughly be used at 60Hz but it didn't support antialiasing or transparency, you needed GDI+ for that. And GDI+ was much slower, even at the smaller resolutions, so you tended to draw into a big bitmap ahead of time and scroll that. Animations in GDI+ were unheard of.
- roel_v 7y agoI'm not sure what you mean by '2D graphics package', so it may be a semantics thing here, but DirectDraw was a 2D graphics API on top of DirectX. I only used it a bit and didn't find that for my uses, the added complexity was worth it over just using GDI, but DirectDraw did do GPU accelerated 2D rendering. How fast it was in light of today's requirements and hardware, I don't know.
- Jasper_ 7y agoAre you confusing it with Direct2D? DirectDraw was an old API from the D3D5-ish era and basically allocated a front buffer you could draw to with GDI. It was not GPU accelerated.
- roel_v 7y agoWell you got me wondering now on what I worked with, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectDraw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectDraw seems to say DirectDraw was hardware-accelerated too. I guess the point is that there are and have been for a long time GPU accelerated 2D API's in DirectX land.