Thanks.

Well I've ammended the code so I'm now creating all my vertices in 5 vertex arrays (1 for each coloured font I have) in system memory, then once per frame I'm copying all those verts to the corresponding 5 VBs and rendering the fonts. So I now have just 5 lock()s and 5 calls to SetStreamSource/SetTexture/DrawPrimitive per frame. I'm also using DYNAMIC VBs in DEFAULT pool and using LOCK_DISCARD.

By doing all this it has just surpassed the old method by about 2%. If you take a look at my options menu above, using the old method of creating, filling, drawing from and destroying a VB for every text entry (there's 28 of them on that screen) I was getting 760 fps and using the new method where I'm not creating or destroying any VBs and just doing 5 locks per frame I'm now getting 780 fps.

It's a better piece of code now, and I guess any amount faster is a good thing, but I really expected more than that.

Oh well, it's not worth worrying about. The text drawing is only a tiny fraction of the time taken per frame while actual gameplay is happening. Time to move on.

Thanks very much for the help Yes the VBs are WRITEONLY.

TBH I should only be rebuilding the VBs when the text on screen changes, but I dunno if it's worth the effort to figure that out since there's greater potential for performance gains elsewhere in the code, and the text does change a lot during gameplay.