Anyway, I tried to bench the basic sprite drawing as best I could. I more or less just took a modified miku example with no auto-spawning / deleting, no movement, no randomized initing, anim, etc. The engine seems a bit sluggish, unless I'm not performing the most basic drawing. I can draw a max of 2900 sprites at 30 FPS with ZGL. With Game Maker, which is notoriously slow, it can still handle drawing a max of 6300 sprites at 30 FPS. I think ZGL needs some optimizations somewhere.