Is anyone aware of this problem or am I misinterpreting the problem. If this is what's happening, is there an equivalent to XPutImage that requests that the stretching operation be done in the graphics hardware which is going to be considerably faster and almost instantaneous I would guess.
No, you're right. And such an API does not exist in 'standard' X AFAIK. Maybe in the Render extension used by Wine do to fonts, but I never really investigated it.
Lionel