Normally without rendering any polygons I get a fps rate of about 65, and with the addition of some terrain (10,000 triangles ) it slips down to about 50. However with the addition of 3 relatively basic 3d studio max models, my fps drops down to a stagering 12 or 13. Switching from immediate mode to using a display list only brought me up to about 17 fps, but now none of my textures seem to show up ( is glBind not allowed inside a display list or something? ). I am a little puzzled on how so many first person shooters can display several complex models at once and maintain at least a 25-30 fps on my computer and yet I am having speed troubles with only a few models.

Since it seems you''re using display lists, you may consider using vertex arrays instead. Those should speed up rendering.

I should add I have a 2 gig pentium 4 with 512 ram and an ATI RAGE Pro 128 UltraGl graphics card and estimate I am rendering 50,000+ triangles to result with about a 12 fps, is this normal?