Using OpenGL will give you a serious performance boost on any 3D card. I suggest you seriously consider it.
There are some other alternatives, however. I have heard that an OpenGL backend of SDL is in the works, so that once this is completed you could do all your regular SDL calls and SDL itself will use GL to perform them. I don''t see this happenning any time soon. Another alternative is to use a differnt lib, like ClanLib, which will use OpenGL as its renderer. Just some other things to think about, aswell.
800x600 on a 19" - blechhh!
glSDL is an available OpenGL backend for SDL. It should speed things up a lot especially if you''re using transparent surfaces.
Some guidelines on how to use it can be found at http://icps.u-strasbg.fr/~marchesin/sdl/glsdl.html.
Some guidelines on how to use it can be found at http://icps.u-strasbg.fr/~marchesin/sdl/glsdl.html.
While learning OGL would take a while, for your purposes a very small subset is required. Essentially you could get by with initialisation/cleanup (which it sounds SDL can help with) and simple 2D quads carrying your artwork. As a second step you could then think of how to use some cleverer texturing (maybe even shader) tricks to achieve your current effects faster and get new effects too. But to get it working quickly shouldn''t requre much GL.
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