How much quicker is AS3.0?

I’m just wondering what are the performance benefits with AS3.0 - are the performance benefits in rendering simply down to the Flash Player you are using or do any performace benefits come from the compiled code? I’m currently developing a game which is using AS2.0 which runs in Flash Player 9 and I find that I get some slowdown when there are around 15 objects on my screen. These objects are comprised of a movieclip with maybe two to three more movieclips which are ‘attached’ to the main object via some update code which calls every frame. I find when there are a good few of these the game starts to suffer - though I am running on quite an old athlon XP 2500+

I’m also concerned that I’ve extended the MovieClip object in my class but I’ve also included a variable in the derived class which is of type MovieClip which I attach my movieclip to - does anyone know if this would make a big impact on performance (i.e. a MovieClip object gets instantiated but no clip is attached to it…)

I have noticed that the game runs well when the quality setting is set to low, which would suggest to me that it’s mostly a rendering speed issue rather than the code which I have written, does flash do better with bitmap objects rather than vectors in large quantities?

Cheers for the help!