GDI

How good is GDI for making games?

Originally Posted by herWter

How good is GDI for making games?

Depends on what games... It's not "meant" for games, but for sure you could use it to create a Tetris/PacMan/Space Invaders/Poker/BlackJack type 2D game without too much difficulty.

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Mats

GDI (unless we're talking about Vista, I think) is NOT hardware accelerated (afaik) and is therefore a poor choice of API for games.

Originally Posted by Elysia

GDI (unless we're talking about Vista, I think) is NOT hardware accelerated (afaik) and is therefore a poor choice of API for games.

It can be if the driver implements it - but it is also perfectly possible to write a driver that performs only the two required BitCopy operations, and punt everything else back to the GDI software solution. [You also need to "initialize" the driver and close it and a few other simple functions to make a complete but minimal windows graphics driver].

However, I do admit that GDI is not necessarily HIGHLY accelerated in modern graphics drivers, because it's generally "fast enough" through the a trivial implementation that implements many of the basic operations with HW acceleration, but not all of them.

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Mats