Image drawing throughput

[Paul Davis <pjdavis homer biomed-eng uiowa edu>]

I know this topic has had the occasional beating, but I wanted to put 
out a feeler to see if anyone has some insight into the more efficient 
meands of drawing images.
Currently, I'm going the route of using a Gtk::DrawingArea and 
Gdk::Pixbuf.  Currently, I'm getting frame rates of about 20-30 fps.
The only thing is, I've got an old OpenMotif program ( that I didn't 
write ) thats probably upwards of 50 fps.  And before you all start 
going on about how 20-30 is respectable, I'm mostly asking because I'm 
gonna be adding some stuff that will slow down the whole process ( image 
processing stuff not associated to the actual drawing ) and if I can 
squeeze a bit more performance out of the drawing, that'd be helpful.
So anyhow, my question is basically, is there a good way to get at the 
underlying XWindows objects to try and avoid the copying operations?  As 
it is now, I got from an 8bit image, to 24bit ( my code ) and then use 
Pixbuf::create_from_data
Now ideally reading from disk directly into the pix buf would be nice, ( 
but my images are in a non standard format for various reasons ).
Anywho, basically, I'm just asking if anyone knows of a good way to 
speed up this type of operation.  And I don't mean cause its flickering 
and absolutely sucks.  I'm talking about boring pistons to get those 
extra few CC's of power.
Any ideas are welcome
Paul Davis