I went through exactly the same process that you''re now going through. I was getting ~20fps with all those set texture and drawprim calls (5,000 quads... strange that we used the same number, but there you have it). Switching it to a single texture and dynamically building the vertex data every frame got me to around 180 fps. I wasn''t using a VB by the way, just a vertex array. A dynamic VB might be even faster, but... well, maybe not. It''s easy to switch between the two to test.

180 fps was before adding in physics, collision detection and so on.

By contrast, my terrain is rendering 160,000 quads at 78 fps. This is static data stored in VB''s and rendered with a single texture.