The X11 drawing primitives have already been extended with the Xrender extension. It allows to draw textured, anti aliased trapezoids, color gradients and many

The X11 drawing primitives have already been extended with the Xrender extension. It allows to draw textured, anti aliased trapezoids, color gradients and many composition/transparency/mask modes. If GLAMOR is enabled it is even hardware accelerated. It is of course much more efficient over the wire than periodically dumping a bunch of bitmaps. The Cairo X11 backend uses Xrender by default. Also many GTK 2.x rendering backends used Xrender. All of this functionality was dropped with GTK 3+.