Quoting julien.breval@tremplin-utc.net:
One problem is that GEM on windows only handles power-of-two textures
(64, 256, 512, etc). So if you have a 300x300 image that becomes 512x512 in OpenGL on windows. With small static images you should not
have any sort of performance issue even on very old hardware. What type of hardware are you using?
Intel 82845G Graphics Controller (internal video device), with a recent PC (Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, RAM = 512 Mo)
Oh say no more, this is a huge part of your performance problem. The only thing Extreme about Intel's graphics chips is how bad they perform. Just about any AGP card will give you a huge boost in speed and offload all of the textures from main memory to the video card.
cgc