how about power usage? huh? meh, can't complain about that anyway, thats progress. good to see. and a million netbooks around the world together weeped. (as they should!)
I thought the term Direct2D died out at the turn of the century? pretty sure you just have to use Direct3D in 2D.
GDI sucked on XP, when it was hardware accelerated, but it wasn't even hw accelerated in vista or win 7?
I'd dare say that just bypassing GDI and direct software rendering to the window buffer would be fast enough, especially on a 920. my Wolfenstein clone ran at 100s of frames a second using that method.
I mean, its good to see them using all the processing power, just as long as it can fall back to software methods. for instance, you could get problems like not being able to run direct X programs across remote desktop.