Alpha'd sprites & EntityOrder performance hit

But, the z-buffer has nothing to do with the order entities are sent to be rendered in. Especially my alpha blended sprites, which aren't z-buffered at all, since the pixels representing the transparent parts can't be calculated until everything else has been rendered.

Also, I'm not stacking loads of sprites on top of each other. The sprites are tiny and only ocassionally will 1 or 2 overlap each other, yet the speed hit is consistent.