I tried to make a spinning hand when I found bitblt takes on average 33 ms to draw the hand each time, this is just one image. When a game draws a screen full of stuff I'd assume it would take longer then the simple bitblt method drawing a small picture on the screen but I guess not.
What common/popular methods exist that I could use to create simple 2d graphics such as drawing an image from a file that take much less time to execute then bitblt?