TJB replied to:
Morten,
Thanks for the response. You will have to excuse my lack of
understanding, but what exactly is "Hardware acceleration" and how
does it work?.
Thanks in advance,
James
Graphics cards have "2D" accelerators as well. Drawing lines, blitting
bitmaps, is generally all done by the hardware of most of today's
graphics cards, not the CPU. These raw primitives match GDI on an
almost one to one basis. If you draw a GDI rectangle or a line, it is
probably hardware accelerated.
GDI+ is a software layer that sits on top of GDI. GDI+ lets you do
fancy fills, subpixel rendering and finally anti-aliased drawing, but
it too even is implemented in terms of regular GDI, where it can be.
DirectX isn't really a drawing API the way GDI+. DirectX deals with
applying sets of polygons in a three dimensional space whereas GDI+
works with pretty much any shape in a 2D space.
GDI is the fastest 2D API. GDI+ is slower than GDI. DirectX is faster
at drawing polygons than either GDI or GDI+, but DirectX can only draw
polygons. IT is even common to use GDI and GDI+ to fill a DirectX
polygon - that is how you can get text on a 3D screen.