The DirectDrawSurface object represents a 2D piece of memory that contains data. This data is in a form understood by the display hardware represented by the DirectDraw object that created the DirectDrawSurface object. A DirectDrawSurface object is created by using the IDirectDraw2::CreateSurface method. The DirectDrawSurface object usually resides in the display memory of the display card, although this is not required. Unless specifically instructed otherwise during the creation of the DirectDrawSurface object, the DirectDraw object will put the DirectDrawSurface object wherever the best performance can be achieved given the requested capabilities.
DirectDrawSurface objects can take advantage of specialized processors on display cards, not only to perform certain tasks faster, but to perform some tasks in parallel with the system CPU.
DirectDrawSurface objects recognize, and are integrated with, the rest of the components of the Windows display system. DirectDrawSurface objects can create handles to Windows GDI device contexts (HDCs) that allow GDI functions to write to the surface memory represented by the DirectDrawSurface object. GDI perceives these HDCs as memory device contexts, but the hardware accelerators are usually enabled for them if they are in display memory.