I did some reading, and the OpenGL situation is not nearly as dire as I think most people believe it is. Microsoft is leaving two avenues open for OpenGL support at the moment. One is an OpenGL compatibility layer that converts to DirectX. That will get you the slideshow style performance I was getting. The other, is that the driver developers can provide support. This is the saving grace, as I just installed the nvidia 101.41 beta drivers. Holy cow, I can use OpenGL again. And it's nice and smooth again.
So, no need to panic about all that
