hi im wondering if there are any tricks to rendering terrain with lots of triangles/squares without slowing down really bad. as that is what i got with only 900 squares being drawn on my terrain... that is indexed and trianglestripped

How many drawindexedprimitive calls ? One or 900 ?

900

It''s an interesting read indeed. Especially if you work with the conclusions. Especially the part where it calculates that CPU''s double in speed every 18 months, while GPU''s have been getting 3.0-3.7 x faster every 18 months. The conclusion is that the ''ideal'' batch size also increases over time.

Recently there was a thread here from someone who said he decreased his batch size from 2000 triangles/batch to 200 triangles/batch and saw no improvement in speed. This was after reading an nVidia''s paper that urged you to batch 200 triangles per batch (maybe even this one). The article above is from 2003 of the end of 2002 I guess, so the number has only increased since.

It does also provide some interesting hints. My current BSP code sorts per texture when loading and draws a 2-pass part (texture and lightmap) then changes the textures. It would be much more efficient to combine them with different texture coordinates and set 8 textures and draw larger batches.