I''m sure this DirectDraw question has been asked a million times already. But, as a rule of thumb, is it better/faster/cleaner to store bitmaps in a million small, individual offscreen surfaces, or in a few big offscreen surfaces?

Smaller surfaces will be more likely to fit into video memory and/or cpu cache, so you''ll generally get better performance with smaller images and surfaces. If you get really crazy with your surfaces and make them huge, you may run into problems with Windows not being able to allocate contiguos (sp?) memory for the surfaces, and they''ll be put into the swap file, which will absolutely kill any performance of your app.

That being said, if you are thinking that a question has been asked a million times already, you might want to consider doing a search on the forum rather than posting an apology, which may make you appear lazy. Some people get really bent about such things.