are views typically any faster/slower than equivilent joins?

I am working with a highly normalized database.  Most of my meaningful
queries involve joins from a primary table to 4-6 secondary tables.

Would my query performance be significantly faster/slower using a View as
opposed to a prepared query using join?

(Assume all join fields are ints, say 10,000 records in main table and a few
dozen records in each of the secondary tables).

Thank you.

Brian Tarbox