> 2D windowing systems used to only redraw "dirty rectangles" but that changed when they moved to GPU compositing as well.
For Win32 and X11 at least the damaged region (or "invalid region") approach is still there and AFAIK recently (as in a few months ago) the modesetting driver for Xorg added the ability to use the damage regions when "TearFree" is enabled (this does server-side composition to avoid tearing - it is disabled by default) to only update the of the screen that changed instead of the entire screen.
Also i remember reading some time ago about some monitors being able to use partial frame data (the monitor "shadows" the frame) so that they can support faster updates.
I think the concept can also help with slow display tech like e-ink devices.
For Win32 and X11 at least the damaged region (or "invalid region") approach is still there and AFAIK recently (as in a few months ago) the modesetting driver for Xorg added the ability to use the damage regions when "TearFree" is enabled (this does server-side composition to avoid tearing - it is disabled by default) to only update the of the screen that changed instead of the entire screen.
Also i remember reading some time ago about some monitors being able to use partial frame data (the monitor "shadows" the frame) so that they can support faster updates.
I think the concept can also help with slow display tech like e-ink devices.