During the late 1990s and early 2000s it was a lot more common for GPUs to provide 2D acceleration, and GUIs were drawn using those primitives. I remember the

During the late 1990s and early 2000s it was a lot more common for GPUs to provide 2D acceleration, and GUIs were drawn using those primitives. I remember the switch to CPU rendering happening, and the subsequent removal of 2D acceleration from GPUs, but I don't remember why. At any rate, the 2D graphics we expect now are a lot more complex than the unantialiased lines, blits, and fills of old.