OpenGL

In a nutshell, yes. See this post:
OpenGL for 2D work
In this fine post I talk to myself trying to figure out how to do it.

Jonathan

On unaccelerated machine OpenGL are terribly slow.

Draw a sprite in DDraw is equal to copy an image from system/video memory to system/video memory.To draw a sprite in OpenGL we must define a quad, transform it and then apply texture...if we have not a 3D card it''s a disaster!

If we have a 3D card that is capable to render hundreds of polygons per frame, we are able to blit hundreds of sprites!
And we are able to use lights, rotations, scaling, transparency (alpha and/or blend); there are a lot of video card with a 3D speed greater than 2D and there are not many ''special FX'' in 2D.

The only drawback is that 3D works only with texture allocated on video-memory and a modern 2D game has several MB of bitmaps stored on system memory.

Of course it seems incredible to use expensive 3D approach to resolve 2D problems but it will be the future.