Neither of the ideas seem to be hard to implement. I say do all variations, and let us know the results/performances :P

hmmm... il probely stick with my shader idea for the simple reason thats its working and im to lazy to do anything else tight now ;p. of course im developing this on a pc that will play Crysis on max graphics so i wont notice the preformance hit. I'l test this on some more PC's during the week and if i notice a performance drop from using my method on lower end PC's il switch over and post back.