Thread: GDI

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