i have a number of objects with alpha transparency, and i need to sort them by distance from the camera, but as far was water goes it is a quad that covers the while map, and the center is at 0,0,0 so i am a bit concerned that i will still get visual artifacts with the water and other transparent objects... what can be done about this? also, are point sprites automatically sorted in hardware as they are created in hardware or do they still need to be sorted when rendering?

...use C++ qsort(...) function!