Okay, I made a test program with DelphiX so if you got unDelphiX I'm not sure whether the source will load correctly. The results were quite surprising. I found that there was an average of 20fps difference between the two methods on my PC, this could be quite different on a low end machine. Here's the link to the exe with source. Hit enter to switch between the two drawing methods. Feel free to recompile before running, I won't get offended let me know what sort of results you get. Mine hovered around 420 for fast mode and 400 for slow mode. I was expecting a bigger gap but that's what tests are all about.

http://zupload.com/download.php?file...&filepath=6340

Oh and just so you know, this obviously isn't optimised in any way. For instance it is a very bad idea to use the Surface.Canvas. It is a very slow way of drawing text to screen IIRC. It's better to have a font sheet with all letters and characters on just blit them to the suface when needed. But that's a subject for another post/test program.

One more thing - lowering the color depth also seems to boost FPS by a huge amount. Although 8-bit requires a decent palette so it depends on what kind of art you are gonna be using.