Text Rendering Slows Framerate?

Hi there,

I was in search of a rendering forum and this one piqued my interest. I have a question and I couldn't find the tech support forum :p I guess this whole forum is tech support. Anyway..

A game I play called Jumpgate has an issue with, what I believe to be, text rendering. It's a pretty old game, from 2000. The problem appears when text shows up on the screen in both a 2d and 3d environment. The frame rate slows down to a point where it looks as if my mouse is lagging - but my mouse isn't lagging, the frames are just slower. I know this because I can see animated storms on the map, and they're slow in frames just like the mouse is. HOWEVER, when I take TEXT off of the map and just look at the waypoints, the framerate comes back up and everything is smooth again. Turn it back on, and the framerate dips back down.

In the 2d Environment, the marketplace, the frames look great - but when I move my mouse across the screen, passing up a bunch of items, it bogs down. HOWEVER, when I take off TOOLTIPS in the settings (disables the little text popups on mouseovers) it's clean as a whistle.

Now here's the tricky part that nobody can understand... OLDER VIDEO CARDS DO NOT EXPERIENCE THIS PROBLEM. Circa 2004 and younger work perfectly fine, but with any card past that year runs into this problem.
I know you may be thinking "well, roll back your driver" .. the problem is, I can honestly say over 15 of us have rolled back our drivers as far as possible and it's still not fixed. That's a real pain in the butt. I've tried looking for answers on the net and ran into tons of similar situations. I've downloaded mouse drivers, software, changed settings, etc. and none of them worked. The game's been experiencing this problem forever and now that the company finally decided to throw one of the original devs back for us to develop more content and fix bugs, he's in a bit of a snare here.

The game is free for download, and you don't need to connect to browse the offline marketplace. But you do need to connect to view the map (because it's live and interactive). You can get a free trial and check it out. . . but I think I described it pretty well. The dev is a bit perplexed on what to do. Any help is appreciated!

Here's what the map looks like
With text (slow): img525.imageshack(.)us/img525/1517/mapvi.png
without text (fast): img822.imageshack(.)us/img822/7268/map2n.png

that is because text model always cost your million of polygons .