Contributed by anonymous.
Generally, you will need a 3D accelerated videocard to get acceptable video performance with games in Blender. Usually, they perform better in 16 bits colors.
When designing a game try to keep the number of polygons and the resolution of the textures low.
The next versions of Blender will have an automatic sectoring system that will determine which polygons to calculate - this will result in a significant speedup of the game engine.
Contributed by B@rt.
This has to do with the level of OpenGL support that most 3D accelerator cards have; while they are good at 3D they're usually not that fast with 2D operations. If you have such a card there's not much you can do about it except to make your window smaller while you need to work with background images.
I've been told that the nVidia GeForce 1,2 (and 3?) cards do not have this problem.
Contributed by B@rt.
Make sure you have a hardware OpenGL card like a TNT2, GeForce or GeForce2. Set the screen resolution to 1024x768 or lower and switch to 16-bit color.
In your games, keep the vertex and face count down and do not use textures with a very high resolution.
Contributed by Daniel Jircik.
Animations tend to play back slow in blender and in other movie players. When using microsoft media player even with new drivers i have found that anything with a higher resolution than 320x280 will not play back smoothly. I
A good way to speed up video playback is to render an animation to AVI-JPG or AVI-RAW and converting it to either MPEG or DivX ;-). MPEG files can be played back on almost any platform while DivX ;-) is only available on Windows at this moment.
To learn how to create MPEG files, please read
https://helium.homeip.net/support/showitem.php?faq_id=115
To learn how to create Divx ;-) files, please read
https://helium.homeip.net/support/showitem.php?faq_id=1018