Even GDI runs on the GPU[1] it just is slower because bitmaps are stored in system ram vs VRAM. IIRC there are tricks a driver can use to make it faster by default[2].

The (admittedly very dumb) issue I as a developer have switching from MFC/ATL to newer kits is that it makes it very hard to ship all in one apps without bloating them by shipping the control toolkit every single time. I realize this is a dumb complaint, but when I can get something down to ~3.5MB which I consider a win for size squishing in modern apps. But does it make sense for all cases? No, if I was writing something people need to use on more than an occasional basis I'd probably grab a toolkit that did the work for me to use D2D (which btw operates on top of either GDI or DX11, not DX12).

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct2d/com... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...