Why don''t you just post your rendering routine, I bet more than a few people will take a look at it for free. And you shouldn''t be worying about anyone ''stealing your engine technology''. There are far better and more complete engines for free all over the web. And if it is running as crappy as you say than why would anyone want to steal it?

so your routine is as follows (you really should post it, make your life easier).

fullscreen or window? (i assume windowed because 400x360 is not valid video resoultion) if windowed make sure nothing is in front of your window at ALL, also you should be using copy and not discard. (or is it the other way around). since one of them forces all windows on the screen to redraw which will kill yoru framerate (then again this would only hapen wehn you call present)

also if you are going to benchmark, please do it correctly. get EXACT resloutions and dont guess at anything. you are just making yourslef look like a moron who has no clue (which may or may not be true).


InitDX8();
LoadGeometry();
LoadTextures();

SetRenderStates();
SetTextureStates(0); // only texture at level 0
SetLights(); // warning mulitple lights kill cpu
SetRenderStates();

while(gameIsRunning)
{
DoWindowsMessages();
DoPhysics();
DoInput();
// etc;

BeginScene();
startTime = GetTickCount();
SetVertexStream(0); // only stream 0 should be set
SetIndexStream(0); // ditto
// notice no locks at ALL!
for(i=0; i{
DrawPrimitive(); // renders entire model once
}
endTime = GetTickCount();
EndScene();
Present();
}

timeelpased = (endTime-startTime); // this is in MILLISECONDS
modelsPerSecond = num_rendering/(timeeplapsed/1000.0f);

of course you system may different and might be why you are getting poor framerates. if your rendering looks this, then go fullscreen. do other game run fast? (i assume yes, then again you may think your engine being in a dll makes it better somehow). does your engine work fine outside the dll? Are you running a release build even? (i assumed yes, but as i see you have no clue, i should stop assuming you have a good idea of what you are doing).

also you are sure you are not drawing the sprite also? (this will kill fillrate). when you say read frrm zbuffer, you dont mean lock() it right?


i stress again, post your init code and you render loop (the part you are timing). trust me anything you post will not be somethign ppl will steal. in fact if they did, they are worse off since it dont work anyway.