Weird Slowdowns

Question:

I have a large church building on my map that the first time it comes on the screen kills my frame rate to 20 fps, then if it goes off the screen and comes back on frame rate stays fast from there on out. Is something not finished loading and/or is there a way to preload it into the buffer so i dont have this initial slow down?

Objects aren't loaded into memory until rendered for the first time. This seems to be a DirectX limitation because I've heard of this happening a lot. The simple fix is to render an initial frame of everything when you first load the level (generally diguised by drawing a loading screen last before you flip) before turning control over to the player.

Oh, that's smart.

Yeh I've noticed this slowdown with a LOT of stuff (not only Blitz) and always wondered how (only -some- of) the big games get around it...