Plan for Christopher Schleiden

"Since directdraw is now gone the initial impressions of 2D performance is not good, in fact horrible. Most people have tried as hard as they could to make the 2d/3d sprite mechanism work efficiently but could not get it even close to that of dx7"

I discoverd the same, so now I'm using again Direct Draw 7 and Direct3D 7.
My little Tile Engine runs with Direct Draw 7 50 % faster than with DirectGraphics 8.