I mainly do AI and game code at Lionhead So its a bit of a mental gear change tonight as I work on speeding up the text rendering engine for StarLines INC. I've tracked down 90% of the games processing to the Vertex Buffer Lock in my text engine. It speeds up massively if I use the flag DDLOCK_NOOVERWRITE in the lock, but I'm having problems rewriting the system to use batches within a vertex array rather than reusing the same array... hopefulyl Ill have it sorted soon.