All presentation display drivers have two major but only marginally related functions: drawing to the display, and drawing to memory bit maps. This dual-mode drawing architecture was resolved by having the bit-map drawing code emulate the XGA hardware. Thus, all of the code needed to set up a drawing operation would be almost identical for the display and for bit maps. Hard-draw mode, therefore, is the mode in which the driver will write data to the XGA adapter, while Soft-draw mode writes only to system-memory bit maps.

Note: The bit map drawing code in the XGA driver emulates a subset of the XGA's hardware drawing capabilities.