> And scrolling won't be faster either. Pretty much every chip made since the mid 90's has a 2D accelerator.
Yeah, that's what I thought too. Then I actually wrote some code for blitting an image to the screen.
Turns out Mac OS X fucking fails it at drawing images. Somehow drawing the image to an offscreen buffer which is then drawn on the screen (like Mac OS X windows normally do) is really fucking slow. You can try this out on a Mac by opening a really big image in Preview, maximizing the window, and scrolling it. It will be choppy as hell.
Apparently you can turn off the backing buffer, but that makes window updating break so badly it's completely useless. Maybe I am missing something there, though. Either way, with the backing buffer on, I'm not going to be drawing anything at fullscreen size or even quarter screen.
Using OpenGL seems to be the way to get something as simple as a smoothly scrolling display of a 2d image.