Normally, I'd just shrug and use Text, but I'm thinking it could just be that my computer can handle the text drawing operations better, and that others might see slowdown. I've no other system to hand to check this.
The Text command is spectacularly slow on some systems. I seem to recall a particular problem with Nvidia cards about a year or so ago. Any use of the Text command would slow the game down to 1fps - even if the code was doing nothing but printing text.I think DrawImageRect is pretty slow and isn't the best solution. Load the characters as an AnimImage instead, and just use 'Drawimage image,x,y,frame'.