Editing Graphics Device Interface (section)

===Windows XP===
With the introduction of [[Windows XP]], '''GDI+''' complemented GDI. GDI+ has been written in C++. It adds anti-aliased 2D graphics, floating point coordinates, gradient shading, more complex path management, intrinsic support for modern graphics-file formats like [[JPEG]] and [[Portable Network Graphics|PNG]], and support for composition of [[affine transformation]]s in the 2D view pipeline. GDI+ uses [[RGBA]] values to represent color. Use of these features is apparent in Windows XP components, such as [[Microsoft Paint]], [[Windows Picture and Fax Viewer]], Photo Printing Wizard, and the My Pictures Slideshow screensaver. Their presence in the basic graphics layer greatly simplifies implementations of vector-graphics systems such as [[Adobe Flash]] or [[Scalable Vector Graphics|SVG]]. Besides, [[.NET Framework]] provides a managed interface for GDI+ via the <code>System.Drawing</code> [[namespace]].

While GDI+ is included with Windows XP and later, the GDI+ dynamic library can also be shipped with an application and used on older versions of Windows.<ref>[http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6A63AB9C-DF12-4D41-933C-BE590FEAA05A&displaylang=en Platform SDK Redistributable: GDI+]</ref>

Because of the additional text processing and resolution independence capabilities in GDI+, the CPU undertakes text rendering.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://blogs.msdn.com/directx/archive/2009/05/12/2d-drawing-apis-in-windows.aspx |title=2D Drawing APIs in Windows - |work=DirectX Developer Blog |publisher=MSDN Blogs |date=May 12, 2009 |access-date=July 19, 2012}}</ref> The result is an order of magnitude slower than the [[Hardware acceleration|hardware-accelerated]] GDI.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks/archive/2006/05/19/gdi-vs-gdi-text-rendering-performance.aspx
|title=GDI vs. GDI+ Text Rendering Performance
|last=Jackson
|first=Chris
|work=Chris Jackson's Semantic Consonance
|publisher=Microsoft
}}</ref>  Chris Jackson published some tests indicating that a piece of text rendering code he had written could render 99,000 glyphs per second in GDI, but the same code using GDI+ rendered 16,600 glyphs per second.

GDI+ is similar (in purpose and structure) to [[Apple Inc.|Apple]]{{'}}s ''[[QuickDraw GX]]'' subsystem, and the open-source ''[[libart]]'' and [[Cairo (graphics)|Cairo]] libraries.