Here are some shots of my last project by DirectX7. these shots show the box which displays an animated progress bar. the animated progress bar was generated with the flash component and moved to the texture of the box. the box goes around sometimes. sprites are simple billboards that contain a texture and draw when the alpha blend is on.

These days by DirectX9 or earlier we can show so many sprites at a time by using shader and simple tricks. for example, we can render thousands of sprites by one draw primitive call by simply batching all quads and sorting them from back to front.