Making sure surfaces aren't copied needlessly is actually a rather common optimization, and particularly so on mobile devices where great care is taken that all

Making sure surfaces aren't copied needlessly is actually a rather common optimization, and particularly so on mobile devices where great care is taken that all subsystems can share memory - e.g. the display silicon needs to be able to use textures from the video decoding directly for scanout. Not doing so escalates quickly - copying a 4k10bpp buffer 60 times per second takes up ~5Gbit of memory bandwidth.