DirectX is by far the best choice (::CreateDevice() and so on)
The worst is SDL : it's dramatically slow because it's not hardware accelerated

I would recommend that you use DirectX, which works just fine to do 2D in, even though it's ment for 3D. And after that you've programmed some 2D i'm quite sure that you wanna try 3D, and if you've already used DirectX then you don't need to get a new SDK.

Quote:DirectX is by far the best choice (::CreateDevice() and so on)

Why is DirectX by far the best choice? Also, what does CreateDevice() have to do with it? (Not saying DirectX isn't a good choice - I'm just wondering why you think it would be a better choice than the other APIs that've been mentioned.)

Quote:The worst is SDL : it's dramatically slow because it's not hardware accelerated

Note that to the extent that this is true, it only applies to SDL running in software mode. It's very common to use SDL along with OpenGL, in which case there should be no major performance penalties. (Also note that the newest version of SDL uses hardware rendering under the hood.)