DirectDraw provides the fastest way to display graphics on-screen. It is the Windows composition engine for 2D graphics, 3D graphics, and video. DirectDraw composes and moves images very quickly and can employ page flipping to enable smooth animation. This combination of capabilities allows you to create high-speed games and multimedia applications and to port existing titles to Windows quickly and easily. DirectDraw is also the composition engine for all of Microsoft's newest graphics subsystems. You can use it to quickly integrate images generated by Windows GDI, Direct3D, ActiveMovie™, and OpenGL.
DirectDraw is a thin layer above the display hardware that enables you to easily take advantage of the powerful composition abilities of graphics accelerators designed for Windows, including high-speed blitting, interpolated stretching, and overlays. It also supports color space conversion, allowing accelerated video playback. Like Direct3D, DirectDraw is a device-independent way for applications to communicate with hardware. Under MS-DOS, you had to optimize code for each target device. With DirectDraw, however, you can attain high performance consistently across all of the hardware that accelerates DirectDraw.
DirectDraw is a COM-based API. Microsoft will incorporate DirectDraw into a future version of Windows. For more information, see About DirectDraw.