I don’t have much ogre experience. In fact, I just started it and I can’t even set up a project file without getting an assertion error. I did, however, compile the sample skeletal animation project and it went incredibly slow. I have done skeletal animation with openGL myself with the same vertex count and it has never gone that slow. Is it just me or is this just a general problem with ogre? Btw, I’m using a Dell Inspiron 8100 hundred laptop 866 mhz, 32 MB Geforce2 go graphics card and 512 RAM.

The software skinning of Ogre is pretty slow. As you have a GeForce 2, your card can't do shaders. If you want to do lots of characters, then you will have to optimize the Ogre system at some point before release. However, I decided to just live with the warts while developing on my own, because it's so much easier to just get stuff done, rather than worry about performance too much. I know I can make it faster if I ever need to.

Regarding FFP skinning, that's just a bad idea. It causes so much batching overhead, that intelligent software skinning is likely to beat it anyway (even in D3DX).

Another thing to watch out for: batching overhead from multiple materials/material groups. Make sure you weld your model into a single material before exporting, so that there's a single sub-mesh in the mesh viewer. Else the performance will be worse than it has to be.