I just found out today that DirectX was SDL’s backend for blitting, right before I jumped on here. That is awesome how you speeded it up with the putenv, I think I’ll try it too. I guess alot of people are really into OpenGL because of making games for phones or something–DirectX is faster than OpenGL on Windows based PCs. Furthermore, even without that putenv, SDL outperforms OpenGL for 2D and thus the vaunted SDL competitor SFML, at least on a computer with common hardware like mine. That’s the thing about information, it can be misinformation depending on what you’re talking about: Mac, Windows, phones, etc. Anyway I hope you find out your answer, and as for me, its putenv() time. -B