Im almost done my game, and I''m just puttin together the finishing touches like a HUD (heads up display). Anyway, I noticed that copyrects is unbelievably slow! Doing copy rects by copying a regular surface ( no other operations or calculations, only copyrects()) which is about 1/10 of the area of the main back buffer surface causes a framerate drop of about 120 from 240, which is nearly a drop of 50%! I searched the forum and found some topics relating to this issue. Argh! What should I do if I want to create a hud that doesnt eat up the framerate?

Use a quad.

quads, as in faces? Hmm, but how would I make it behave like something that was rendered in 2d?

look at the 2D in DX8 article on this site. Or, there are numerous articles on this forum that discuss this issue. CopyRects is the wrong way.

Yep, damn, this is really fast! And now I have true alpha blending!