Flex, AR and speed improvement

I am working on an AR project for a client when I ran into major performance issues.  It drove me batty because I tested out a bunch of stuff and couldn't get the performance up.  For starters, I am using a dae file (standard stuff), then I load it in using collada, and that's where the crap started bottoming out.  I tried multiple ways to fix it, testing whether it was my app, the dae, the AR, or what!  I even connected w/ ARToolworks and Eric Socolofsky.  They made some suggestions, like using Windows to take advantage of FP10.1.5's newest drivers which are great on the graphics card (but don't help me because I'm on a Mac).  Instead, after countless hours and angry griping, I happened upon a small discovery, the rendering engine in Papervision.  This little sucker is rendering my dae and making my 3D model work.  Well, it was using Quadrant, which was eating up about every resource to make my model look nice and smooth.  Once I switched that to Lazy, I got a huge performance boost (going from 1-2 fps up to 10-11 fps).