Spheres and quadratics

What is the fastest way to draw a texture mapped sphere? I used gluSphere(quadratic,1.3f,32,32) and it works nice on TNT2 16MB (60FPS) but when I try it on a 4MB rage, the frame rate is something like 8FPS (its 20FPS if the distance between camera and sphere is great enough) ?! the texture is 512x256, for the sphere I cannot use less than 32x32 (not circular enough), display is 640x480x16, so I am wondering is there a better way to draw a texture mapped sphere? maybe use bezier curves to lessen the amount of vertices? Any ideas?

Thanks

try sticking it in a display list , also reduce the size of your texture or use mipmapping. a sphere of 32x32 is 2048 triangles quite a few for one object.
bezier will most likely slowit down even more ie it has to draw the same number of tris but its gotta do more maths to get those tris in the first place