Re: Notes on cairo/win32

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:30:36 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> An interesting question that I don't know the answer to yet is whether
> GDI+ is at all hardware accelerated currently (or will be in the
> future.) If GDI+ is just a layer on top of GDI, then we may be losing
> more efficiency and convenience fighting a slightly different
> abstraction model then we gain, since we already have code for software
> rendering.

As far as I'm aware it is not hardware accelerated yet (fixed in Longhorn
apparently, but who knows if that's an intention or already completed
work). I don't know if that's because the drivers don't accelerate it or
because GDI+ itself doesn't. The fact that it's a redistributable implies
to me that it's done entirely in software though possibly the shipped XP
implementation is different to the redistributable.

Regular GDI is fully hardware accelerated though and has been for a long
time.