Comment by seanmcdirmid

Not the same thing! This is like comparing pre-DX8/programmable shader hardware acceleration to the fixed-function crud we had to deal with a long time ago. Ya, you can emulate fixed functions with programmable shaders, but its a poor way to make use of a modern GPU.

Here is a good discussion of the topic:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff72...

Excerpts:

> When the GDI DDI was first defined, most display acceleration hardware targeted the GDI primitives. Over time, more and more emphasis was placed on 3D game acceleration and less on application acceleration. As a consequence the BitBlt API was hardware accelerated and most other GDI operations were not.

> In order to maintain compatibility, GDI performs a large part of its rendering to aperture memory using the CPU. In contrast, Direct2D translates its APIs calls into Direct3D primitives and drawing operations. The result is then rendered on the GPU. Some of GDI?s rendering is performed on the GPU when the aperture memory is copied to the video memory surface representing the GDI window.

> Existing GDI code will continue to work well under Windows 7. However, when writing new graphics rendering code, Direct2D should be considered, as it takes better advantage of modern GPUs.