If you hear the term Direct2D, you are probably thinking of some outdated technology that preceded the Direct3D. That, however, is not true; Direct2D has only been introduced recently with Windows 7 and Server 2008. Although made by Microsoft, the Linux alternative shares the same name (well, almost; officially, it's Direct2DAccel). And yes, this is for X - not for Wine or anything like that.

D2D enables graphic cards to do what we always wanted them to do – perform graphic tasks. Unless you are playing video games (probably not so much if you are using Linux), your graphic card's processor (GPU) doesn't do a whole lot – even when you are playing movies. That all made sense in the beginning, when GPU's power was 75-150 MHz. However, the GPUs nowadays are capable of running much faster than that and they hunger for jobs.