Apologies for getting your name wrong; it should be fixed now. I also made some other changes which I hope address the points you brought up. I didn't know abou

Apologies for getting your name wrong; it should be fixed now. I also made some other changes which I hope address the points you brought up. I didn't know about Windows 2000 layered windows, but I think the section on which systems had process separation was just confusingly worded. Counting Intel, most (by number) desktop devices have pretty sophisticated hardware layer capabilities. Sky Lake has 3 display pipes, each of which has 3 display planes and a cursor. The multiple pipes are probably mostly used for multi-monitor configurations, but it's still a decent setup. From the hints I've picked up, I believe DirectFlip was largely engineered for this hardware. There are lots of interesting latency-reducing tricks. Some of those might be good inspiration, but what I'm advocating is a general interface that lets applications reliably get good performance. Thanks for the discussion!