zendorf - the problem is probably solely to do with graphics card drivers. Even old laptops should be able to easily get 60 FPS when using hardware acceleration. Your results sound like you're getting software rendering because your driver is known to be buggy. Updating your driver may fix it and give you 60 FPS again.
We experimented with the node-webkit exporter forcing hardware acceleration to be on all the time, and we got lots of bug reports of crashes or games rendering with really bad glitches making the game unplayable. These were all graphics card driver problems. So we realised they're disabled for good reason. You'll probably have these kinds of problems (crashes and severe glitches) with any engine or framework that uses hardware acceleration; just wait until you publish your game and see if you hear about people complaining of crashes or glitches. Top commercial games have the resources to spend days or weeks working around catalogues of obscure driver bugs; most smaller companies can't do that. With C2's engine we decided to follow Chrome's policy that reliability is better than speed. Users with reliable systems get great performance, and users with unreliable systems get slower but reliable games. Software rendering may be slow, but it avoids the many crashes and glitches caused by graphics card drivers, so at least the game works for that user rather than being totally unusable.
So this is a deliberate decision to make sure your games are playable on a wider range of systems. You should advise users to update their graphics card drivers regardless of which technology you use, to ensure maximum performance and best reliability. If users playing C2 games also update their drivers, they are likely to get significantly better performance if they previously got software rendering.
In our experience, graphics card drivers are the #1 technical problem with games on any platform.