Is it reasonable to use OpenGL for desktop applications?

Question

I've been writing a small desktop gadget-type application that displays scrolling text along the bottom of the screen (Similar to the old CNN news ticker), however the performance of GDI is just unsatisfactory (As high as 8-12% on a quad core and 20% on a single core) even after I've attempted to clean out bottlenecks.

I was considering using OpenGL instead to render everything, but I don't know if that is a reasonable option to require users to have hardware acceleration for a tiny app like this.

Does anybody have any input on this?

Answer 1

If you're comfortable with using OpenGL and your intended users are happy with the additional dependencies that OpenGL brings then I say go for it. :)

In terms of staying with GDI, I'd make sure you're rendering the text a few times as possible (through such techniques as rendering to bitmap and just scrolling that instead).

If neither one of those two options sounds appealing then there's always DirectX.