Basic performance tips.

I was wondering if someone could give me some basic performance tips on how to improve performance in a 2D game. I’m using Quads and Textures built with Display Lists (for each frame in an animation). The performance is decent I suppose, 2,500 draws per frame at 30 fps in windowed mode (my comp specs are g2, 256mb ram, 800mhz athlon). I tried using vertex and texcoord arrays instead of draw lists, no performance was gained.

So I’m curious, is there any way to speed this up? Perhaps using triangles would be faster? (although that would require twice the amount of triangles compared to quads, 2 triangles per quad). What about Vertex Buffers? I heard you can enable them using extensions, or gain other improvements using extensions. Anyone have a link that shows how?

Thanks in advance.

Do you know if you are fill-rate limited or geometry limited? (Change the window size to find out. Below a certain size the frame rate will stay the same, meaning geometry is the limit.)

The size of my window doesn’t seem to effect the performance at all. I should also mention that I’m drawing 32x32 quads, and I’m just drawing 2500 quads on top of each other to do a quick performance check.