Point sprites
Author
Hi everyone,
I'm using point sprites to render a particle system. The problem is that when the system is close to the camera the size of point sprites stops increasing having reached some value. I guess there's a GPU limit for point size. Is it solvable? Or should I just switch back to traditional quads?
Thank you
You could try D3DXSprite as a third option. It doesn't seem to share the point sprite's scaling problem, and gives you extra functionality such as automatically batching and sorting sprites by texture or depth.
Author
My primary objective is performance and I don't need to sort sprites or anything like that. As far as I know, D3DXSprite just creates quads so I might as well do the same myself.
You can do that if you like, but the reason for D3DXSprite is to avoid having to go through all that effort. It performs very well, and for particle systems you generally should sort particles from back to front. It helps to avoid certain depth-buffer/alpha-blending problems that are common in particle systems.
Author
Hmm... Which problems are you referring to exactly? I just blend the particles in arbitary order with z-buffer test turned on and z-buffer writing turned off. It looks very well so far, I don't see any problems with this. Of course, I draw opaque geometry before I draw particle systems.
That's because you use additive blending (assumtpion!). When you use other blending methods, artifacts will appear.
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