It took a bit of working out, but finally SharpGL can support hardware acceleration. Previously, all rendering in SharpGL was done to a DIB Section, the result of this would be blitted to the screen. Much playing around has shown that in fact this is problematic - rendering to DIB sections can never be hardware accelerated.
To hardware accelerate rendering, the rendering must be to a window or a pixel buffer. This has introduced an architectural change to SharpGL - the handling of a render context and any supporting objects (DIB sections, windows etc) is handled by a class that implements the IRenderContextProvider interface. This interface specifies that render context providers must be able to Create, Destroy, Resize and Blit.
SharpGL 2.0 now has two render context providers, DIBSectionRenderContext provider which uses a DIB Section as previously and HiddenWindowRenderContextProvider which renders to a hidden window. The hidden window render context provider allows full hardware acceleration.
I will be adding a new example application to the solution which shows rendering with the two providers side by side.
So don't forget: DIB Sections can't be accelerated.