Quote:
Originally Posted by Thomas Richter
The substantially different thing is that you do not need to move graphics around, which is quite an advantage on slow machines or slow graphics cards. Nowadays, of course, this makes no difference and no sense anymore. You can realize screen dragging just as compositing effect with the GPU. In fact, this is how it works on AmigaOs 4. There, a screen is just a moving raster where the GPU moves graphics data around.
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Yes, but this was advantage of Amiga HW (capability to display various screen modes) and it was used by Amiga OS contrary to PC OS's - i don't recall single PC app using splitscreen (beside some video test running in DOS) and perhaps i was able to use single app using windowing (not sure but it could be graphic viewer QPV in DOS). Nowadays usually you have graphic compositor where multiple layers of graphics (with different organization, bitdepth etc) is combined, frequently with freely definable alpha etc and everything in HW.