Hi everyone, I've been looking to get into gamedev and I keep having trouble deciding home to move forward with 2d game development. I've set up and used SDL before, and my only real question is when doing 2d development should I use SDLs native rendering calls or should I use SDL and set up a openGL window and use openGL for my graphics.

Are SDL graphic calls sufficient and fast enough? I really have no idea.

Thanks.

SDL is probably sufficient for any sort of basic game you would want to make. But I believe that it is not hardware accelerated unless you use openGL for the rendering. OpenGL however is more difficult to use. You may want to check out SFML http://www.sfml-dev.org/. I am using for a 2d game now and it is working great. I switched to it from SDL because I needed sprite rotation that was available in SFML but not SDL. SFML graphics is basically a 2d wrapper for openGL so you get the power of openGL without all the work.

I was under the impression that SDL used OpenGL under the hood, and functions more or less as a wrapper for OpenGL. Wrappers tend to restrict functionality in favor of simplicity, but that is unlikely to be s concern for you at this point.

Assuming you're coding in C++, I'd also second the recommendation to consider SFML over SDL.