The static version does not support hardware rendering. I have a geforce3 with the nvidia drivers installed and working so I don’t want to use the static version.
You could also try downloading the source and re-compiling it for your system. It’s a fairly painless processes, though the configure script didn’t seem to add an -lpng to my Makefile and I ended up adding that in myself to get it to compile. If you have Python 2.3, you’ll probably need to compile it yourself anyway.