It's not like it's constrained to the web either. I had a bit of an epiphany about the state of desktop Windows a few years ago when for a hobby project I wrote a UI using only Win32 and C and no external dependencies. Maybe it took longer to write than it should have but I was really shocked at how the thing ran so much faster and smoother than just about any UI I was using on that machine. It dawned on me that all those layers of MFC, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and whatever else they'll come up with in the name of developer productivity are no match for a set of APIs designed to run at 25MHz with 8MB of RAM.
This is believable, but I'd like to dig a little deeper. Do you remember which Windows apps you were comparing yours against? And on what version of Windows?
This was Windows 7, I am pretty sure with dwm disabled, and it was comparing (albeit informally) against every Windows app I used at the time.
I know that some newer frameworks take advantage of GPU features (actually I used to work as a dev in the Windows org) but guess what, GDI is still faster.
