For the last 6 months I've been planning a full-scale 2D rpg. The ideas are great and I have people that are going to help me with sound and art. I'm doing all the programming though because that's my hobby and I love it. I recently started working on it and have come accross some performance issues. I've gone over the small ammount of code I have, and it's very efficient. I decided the problem is the API that i'm using. I'm writting the game in Python using the Pygame library for input and rendering. But Pygame is based off of SDL and is software (not hardware) accelerated. So I'm assuming for such a large and full-scale project, that I should use an API that is hardware accelerated. What are some of your suggestions or ideas? Am I using the wrong language/API? Thanks in advance.

** EDIT **
I forgot to add that I have been doing game programming for almost 3 years now. I'm not claiming to be anything special but I'm not a newbie. I also have experience in Java and C/C++. I've done some basic stuff with SDL and SFML. And I am most definitely willing to learn something new so that wouldn't be an issue. Time is not a big deal for this project, its just a hobby of mine. But I would like to do it the right way.

For the last 6 months I've been planning a full-scale 2D rpg. The ideas are great and I have people that are going to help me with sound and art. I'm doing all the programming though because that's my hobby and I love it. I recently started working on it and have come accross some performance issues. I've gone over the small ammount of code I have, and it's very efficient. I decided the problem is the API that i'm using. I'm writting the game in Python using the Pygame library for input and rendering. But Pygame is based off of SDL and is software (not hardware) accelerated. So I'm assuming for such a large and full-scale project, that I should use an API that is hardware accelerated. What are some of your suggestions or ideas? Am I using the wrong language/API? Thanks in advance.