I've created a small app that draws a cube on the screen and it slowly rotates. On each face of the cube is a texture. These 6 textures are changed between each frame by a RenderToSurface method.
Just 8 verticies, 6 textures, & 12 draw calls per frame (6 to create the textures, 6 to draw each face on screen). That's all I've got going on.

I have another app that I made that loads a mesh from a .x file and the mesh has 40000 plus verticies & about 20 subsets, no textures.

In fullscreen the cube app runs about 900 FPS and the mesh app about 1200. in windowed mode, the mesh app about 60 & the cube app about 45.

Question 1; Are working with textures really that costly? I mean 40000+ verticies versus 8. What am I missing?

Question 2: The samples in the nvidia sdk run faster in windowed mode that fullscreen, mine run slower. What is the main reason for this?

Thanks in advance,
Steve