Since im blitting alot of alpha blending stuff, I have put all my surfaces into System Memory. But ive lost half my framerate in Fullscreen mode!!!!!! How do I overcome this problem? Should I put the surfaces that are not involved with alpha blitting into video memory or something? HELP!!

uh, I think you answered your own question. Try Video Memmory.

So i guess having lotsa small surfaces for each frame of animation is better than putting all the frames on one big surface, in terms of pumping as much surface mem into the vidcard?

I guess I should also put surfaces that are blitted alot into vidmem.?.

If you are using any per-pixel hand-coded operations such as alpha-blending then to maximize your framerate you want all surfaces that take part in the alpha-blending to be in sysmem. The system I use is this:

1. Create your front and back buffers in vidmem.
2. create a surface (we''ll call i, worksurface) in sysmem the size of your back buffer.
3. All bitmaps involved in alpha-blending get created in sysmem.
4. Any bitmaps that do not involve alpha-blending (such as a health meter or decretive border) go in vidmem.

Compose your next frame of animation on the worksurface with alpha-blending etc., copy thisd to the back buffer, then blt your health meters and borders etc.

With this method do not expect to achieve 85fps. I figure 30fps is possible. That''s the cost of per-pixel operations.

If you have a static background performance can be improved by using dirty rectangles.

2-cents,
John

But when I put most of my surfaces in SysMem I lost over half my framerate.

The Alpha blending function used two surfaces, on of them needs to be the backbuffer in my case, as im blending some sprites with the backbuffer.

This is how i do it:
1) Copy the destination rect from the back buffer to a surface in sysmem.
2) Blend the two surfaces.
3) copy the result back to the back buffer.

Its kinda slow, is there an alternative?

Kylotan is right on. The copy from vidmem to sysmem is killing you. After many failed attempts I came to the conclusion that if you want per-pixel hand-coded effects then you have to do everything in sysmem in a ''scratch buffer'' or ''work surface'' then copy all of this or a parts of it (dirty rects) to your vidmem back buffer. Do not get hung up on framerate, you will NOT be able to sustain 60fps and have hand-coded alpha-blending.

John