Putting some extra effort into generating a simpler database makes a significant difference when traversing that data for display. A common tendency is to leave the data in a format that is good for loading or generating the object, but non-optimal for actually displaying it. For peak performance, do as much of the work as possible before rendering. Preprocessing of data is typically done at initialization time or when changing from a modeling to a fast-rendering mode.
See ``Rendering Geometry Efficiently'' and ``Rendering Images Efficiently'' for tips on how to store your geometric data and image data to make it more efficient for rendering.