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First post, by ColdBrain

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To me it sounds like a strange thing that ddraw is slower than even overlay, considering it's a hardware-accelerated mode. I've tested it only in Build engine games, but surely this shouldn't be the case? I see plenty of people recommending ddraw as the fastest output mode, but in my case it isn't...

Reply 3 of 6, by kjliew

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ddraw should be faster than surface. If you scale the display output for the games (normal2x, normal3x etc.), ddraw scaling is offloaded to HW. If you don't scale, then ddraw is on-par with surface. But, modern CPUs do move pixels quite fast these days. Perhaps, the diff is negligible. On older/slower retro level HW, ddraw/overlay has significantly lower CPU usage compared to surface, and the CPU cycles saved can be put into increasing DOSBox cycles.