Comment by mfunk
13 years ago
"No mainstream 2D rendering system (not X.org, not Mac OS Quartz, not Windows GDI/WPF+DWM) uses any graphics acceleration to draw 2D primitives."
That isn't entirely true. Windows has Direct2D for graphics and DirectWrite for text after all.
Direct2D and DirectWrite were first introduced for Windows Vista and 7 using Direct3D 10. Windows 8 expanded it using new features found in Direct3D 11.
You can see the high performance and fluid animations it brings in many of the Metro applications. Desktop applications need to migrate their existing code of course. IE and Firefox have done this already.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/07/23/hardware-accel...
And there's no reason we can't have the same kind of library on linux, except one that would render using OpenGL. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Qt already supports rendering using OpenGL.