You should go with using the directx blitters. The reason for this is that by using the dx blitters, dx will automatically take advantage of any hardware acceleration available.

Yeah, but there are a quite a few reasons to write your own blitter:

If you are blitting a lot to system memory there you really can't take advantage of any hardware acceleration because there is none.

If you want to do alpha-blending, or if you want to do color conversion, you will really have to write your own blitter.

DirectDraw's Blit locks the surface before and unlocks after. So if you have a lot of blits you have that Lock/Unlock overhead

Also, it's not hard to write your own blitter.

- Splat

Hmm my card says i have acceleration for system to video.......

Here we go again! hehe I asked the question to avoid getting mixed revues I think I will write my own blitters for a couple reasons...

1- I guess I will learn something.
2- I am in the process of making an alpha blitter so might as well continue it
3- I guess eventually, I will have les problems porting.

Anyways, Splat i will continue writting my own blitter maybe you can help me optimize it later on!

I agree on writting your own blitter for some things. But in general i would mostly use directdraw's. Because can you do all the work for things like mmx,videomemory,acceleration,ect? For alpha ya your gonna have to write your own or use d3d. Do the locks unlocks hurt real bad.. I cant say for sure but on my 4mb card in 800x600 and no bitmaps other than the screen and backbuffer in videomemory. I get 75+ fps(max of my refresh) drawing 32x32 tiles to fill the screen(each using directdraws blt)

Anyways i suggest you leave ddraw blitting as a option (after all if they have 32mb of memory and you can fit all your images in vram.......)

voodoo: I would be glad to help you out once you've got some prototype blitter code working. If you haven't already, you might want to check out the MMX Enhanced Alpha-Blending article up on this site somewhere...

I agree that it would be stupid to forget the DirectDraw blitter, since those video memory -> video memory blits are just SO nice. Having a full-featured self-written software blitter, a damn-fast bare-bones DirectDraw software blitter, and a super-fast video-video mem hardware blitter gives you quite an arsenal when it comes to speeding up your game once you run into graphic bottlenecks.

- Splat

Guys, I spoke to one of the best game programmers out there, Andre Lamothe, for those who don't know him. He is the author of Windows Game Programming for Dummmies, Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus and the old Dos versions...

And I quote:
"you can't beat the speed of hardware period. Use the blitter."

So bassicly I will use the DX blitters for basic blitting, but for doing alpha, and additive blending I will have to go and write my own stuff.

Yep, its virtually impossible to blit in software faster than the hardware blitter can do it. I don't have any benchs of the performance difference though.

My project game is written purely with software draws to a system-memory buffer, which is blitted to the screen. This allows for very exchangable software drawing routines. (Have a draw pointer that can be set for normal, alpha, add, or whatever drawing style you wish)

Still, if you're going to be > 640x480 res, or doing alot of overdraw, hardware blit is a good idea, even if it makes you unportable.

-- Remnant

Really, it depends on your game, but I feel in general it is better to write your own. Yes you lose the hardware capabilities, but many times you can do it better, and nearly as fast.

Depending on your game, you can avoid tons of locks/unlocks if you do it yourself. Also, since you know what format the data will be in, your blitter can be very specialized and fast.

If you only have a couple of blits per frame to do, then go ahead and use the ddraw blitter, but if you have more than 10 or so, I'd start to consider writing your own.

what cards out there support 2d hardware blitting? (acceleration)

ati in general i think is one of em who else?

later,
scott