Thanks for your replies
Appreciate the time spent

2) With "Present" commented out no work will be acually done to render anything (I mean videocard driver will not even start rendering current frame until you call Present).
I could be wrong, but I thought Device.Present just flips the backbuffer on a primary surface, does it not? And method Device.Clear in this case fills the backbuffer with blue color. So if Device.Present is commented out, the app will just fill the backbuffer every frame. The rendering (if you can call it that) will occur, only it will not be visible.

When I comment out Device.Clear, then nothing gets rendered at all and FPS skyrockets.

Thanks for your tips with timers. Most helpful.

I'm starting to think, it is not the program. I ran the first tutorial from the DirectX SDK October 2005 and had the same issue. Could it be something else? For instance, I have .NET framework version 1.1 installed. Do I need version 2 maybe? Or could it be my overclocked Graphics adapter? Or may be it is a bug in Delphi compiler?

So I guess my next question is has anyone actually had the same problem (see the topic), when running Direct3D application developed with Delphi 8 and DirectX for managed code SDK October 2005?

Thanks,
Alex