[AD] New possible driver and accelerated features?

[Chris <kcat@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I was just thinking. Given todays computers and the capabilities of the 
video cards, would you people object to adding a few more hw accelerated 
functions? AFAIK, it'd just require a few more bitmap vtable entries, 
until the drivers start supporting them. I was thinking along the lines of:

vram->vram stretch blit
and
vram->vram masked stretch blit

I know people (including myself) that have felt limited even in 2D 
because we couldn't do stretching or masked stretching in hardware, and 
would have to fall back on normal double buffering (which is still slow 
comparitively).


As for a new (gfx) driver idea, what about a DirectX 9 (or even 7 or 8) 
driver that's seperate from the current one? I don't use Windows 
anymore, but given the advantages that 7/8/9 have over 3 (or 2?), I 
think having a newer version available would be well worth it, even if 
it is a seperate driver.

Though obviously since none of us really use Windows we'd have to ask 
someone else to do it, but I think we should take a proactive approach 
(ie. asking those who do use Windows to please do it) instead of just 
hoping they can as a side project.

- Kitty Cat