Q:

Why is OpenGL provided with latest GeForce drivers so extremely slow?

I'm writting a code in OpenGL and using two computers - an old and a new one.
On the old computer (which I use for debugging/creating implementation for the old GL) I have GeForce 5500 FX. Before windows reinstall on it, I had NVIDIA drivers with OpenGL 1.5. And everything worked perfectly. Games made quite good FPS, even with dozens or hundreds sprites.
However, after XP reinstall, I installed the drivers provided with my video card but it seems there's no OpenGL at all (mysterious 'GDI Generic' renderer). So I tried to download the newest NVidia drivers. After their installation I saw there's OpenGL 2.3 but when I runned my app it worked with extremely low FPS (about 0.25, I mean I had to wait four seconds for any app reaction) with only one sprite. And as I loaded smaller images, the FPS relatively increased, but on the new computer it's always (no matter how big and how many sprites) speed, so it must be the perfomance problem. Without any sprites, it seemed it worked normal, but game without graphics doesn't make any sense.
That's why I downloaded the oldest drivers for NVIDIA GeForce 5500 FX I found on the Nvidia site. But they're still providing OpenGL > 2.0 (2.1 exactly). The problem's the same.
I also tried to change all the properties of OpenGL to increase performance but it didn't help too.
So what can I do? I'd like to find drivers with OpenGL 1.5 but it seems they're not on the NVIDIA site and most people say it's the best to download they from there.

A:

The problem is most likely that you're using non-power-of-two textures.  The drivers for the GeForce FX series support these texture sizes, but will force your program to run in software mode.  If this is the case then you'll need to use power-of-2 texture sizes (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc) instead.

A:

It sounds like the 2nd machine is doing software rendering - hence the slow frame rate.
I'd check that the new version of OpenGL is detecting the card properly. It could be that it thinks that it doesn't support OpenGL fully - or at least the bits you are using - hence the fall back to software.
Do other applications that use OpenGL work OK?
If it's just your program it could be the way you are initialising OpenGL. I'd post a question on Stack Overflow - with the code.

