django templates performance
The question is sort-of nonsensical.  Templates are always going to be slower than a hand-tuned rendering solution, but template tags still need to run through the Template machinery, so you lose out any advantage there.  If you want ultra-high efficiency, consider writing all of the HTML as an array of Python strings, join() them once and then pass your HTML back as the body of an HTTPResponse object.
Or, you could try all three and profile them.  Since we don't know your code, we can't do that work for you.  After a couple of experiments, you should be satisfied with which approach is correct for you.
The templating engine is almost never your bottleneck.  You database is your most likely bottleneck.  You do have the Django Toolbar installed, right?  If the templating engine is not where your performance is at issue, always use the solution that cheapest for you to implement.
Which is more efficient in Django: to render an object using the template language? or to push the code to render the object via a templatetag function using the python language?