My game/app is totally in 2D using DirectDraw.
I have heard that using 3D hardware (using a TNT, Voodoo or similar) as the primary surface instead of the standard DirectDraw primary surface is heaps faster!?!? And I will be able to use the extra features 3D cards deliver (like smoothing etc..).

How do I implement a 3D Primary Surface without really implementing Direct3D?
I dont want to add 50,000,000,000 lines of code to my app just to get access to a simple 3D surface, and I dont really have the time to learn Direct3D at the moment, so...

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A plain DirectDraw primary surface is always used whether you using Direct3D or not -- there is no special primary surface for Direct3D (Direct3D uses DirectDraws primary surface).

I think the method your hearing about is this: using 3d hardware to draw polygons with texture maps on them instead of plain old sprites. This allows you to use all the features 3D hardware lets you use (Alpha Blending, Shading, etc.), while not having a huge affect on performance (drawing 20-50 polygons isn't going to be terribly slow, heck, even 100 wouldn't be too bad).

Sadly, youll need to learn Direct3D (or OpenGL) to do this. Luckily they aren't too hard to learn, but unless you absolutely need these features I'd just stick with plain DirectDraw.

--TheGoop