Since you are talking about AERO, please check WDDM, which allows video memory paging. What this means is that technically the video memory is not bound by the limitations you explained. In other words, you may stop worrying that you'll end up without video memory on Vista+.
Flickering is caused by rendering being out of sync with vertical retrace, therefore enabling VSync resolves the issues in most cases. Please do not confuse or mix Windows XP and Windows Vista+, as the two use very different approaches and completely different driver models.
Not according to the following:
Actually, it's Windows 7 that brings back hardware acceleration to GDI, but on Windows Vista it's made entirely in software. [Reference]In Windows Vista, all Windows applications including GDI and GDI+ applications run in the new compositing engine, Desktop Window Manager which is built atop the Windows Display Driver Model. The GDI render path is redirected through DWM, and GDI is no longer hardware-accelerated by the video card driver. [4][5] However, due to the nature of desktop composition (internal management of moving bitmaps and transparency and anti-aliasing of GDI+ being handled at the DWM core), operations like window moves can be faster or more responsive because underlying content does not need to be re-rendered by the application.
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