So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[JC_]

It's an abandoned project (the developer seems to have just vanished) built ENTIRELY around outdated OpenGL functionality. I don't doubt you get 60 FPS in what are probably relatively simple 2D sprite games, but that's just your CPU brute-forcing the immediate-mode rendering. If you tried to scale ZenGL up to anything relatively complex you would hit a brick wall, trust me.

With ZenGL you can render >10 000 animated sprites with transformations on 10y old hardware without any problems, it uses sprite batching etc. If there is any bottleneck so it's management or structure of game objects and their dynamics adding and removing - so rather Pascal language performance problems. Also internal ZenGL gameloop have some gaps in performance and it does a lot.