December 2000
Intermediate to advanced
1280 pages
28h 56m
English
Content preview from Windows Graphics Programming Win32 GDI and DirectDraw®Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 5. Graphics Device Abstraction
The main Windows graphics programming API is GDI, which stands for Graphics Device Interface. DirectDraw is Microsoft's new two-dimensional game-oriented programming API, while Direct3D is for games and applications that need three-dimensional display. These graphics APIs are device-independent programming interfaces, which allow applications written in them to run on different graphics devices.
To make a graphics API device independent, it needs a good graphics device abstraction which can represent a variety of graphics devices, hide their differences, yet not sacrifice performance.
This chapter will examine GDI's main mechanism of graphics device abstraction: device context. We will look at features provided ...