Quote: "I'm sorry that is literally impossible"
Well by "emulation", I'm actually meaning the Windows version of the 360 library that is wrapped around Win32 (and Win32+ WinForms) so there is a bit of performance drop on calling compared to the classic which calls using gdi; but once on the card the xui relies on the shader core rather than locked pixels in the fixed function pipeline.
I mean cards no longer have a dedicated 2D aspect anymore, and the only reason they never appeared to drop performance in that respect is because they had much faster clock speeds.
When you get down to it though, what is quicker for drawing to screen... GDI+ or Direct3D? The answer is pretty obvious, and this is why there is little performance drop.
With Vista, it'll rely on GDI converted to DXGI so there's a layer of emulation (or wrapping) going on anyway for the classic mode. Not something noticeable due to the lack of load on what is going on really, but SVG ironically also doesn't really use as much load as the Basic/Aero images.
I think what is interesting is Basic and Aero, already uses antialiasing; as SVG does this as a built in feature using the cards own FSAA system (or shader 10 programmable FSAA) it means you don't have to sacrifice quality for performance too much.
What's possibly more interesting to note is that, via GDI rendering to background (i.e. Wallpaper) you're pretty much killing performance especially on higher resolutions. I mean remember that Vista only runs at 800x600 or larger (standard ppl tend to use is 1024x768, 1440x920 or 1280x1024) at those resolutions GDI just buckles and dies.
Still quicker than Basic and Aero mind, just higher resolutions are part of why SVG was being considered by Microsoft as the performance drop from each resolution was fairly minimal. Infact you can easily double rendering resolution which under normal circumstances ment almost 1/4 the performance yet with SVG means 3/4 the performance. (well XUI it does)
You just have to think about this all in terms of the different pipelines and how vista is using them.
