every day i'm getting deeper into 3d programming and i start wondering if it is nessecary to render all the objects / particles / etc.. in a certain order? i know that i need to render first all non transparent objects and after that all transparent in back to front order. but apart from that, is there anything else i need to take into account when i want a good performance in my game? currently i'm rendering everything in a logical order ( where it's possible ). my engine gets bigger and i don't want to screw everything up by making basic mistakes and realizing that i have to rewrite half of the code. do you know if it's nessecary? if so, what reason does it have? *edit* i'm using direct x ( perhaps that makes a difference to opengl )

To add on to what Saruman said, what you want to do is minimize the changing of states. Everytime you switch a shader or a texture or whatever you're going to incur a penalty. So, more specifically, you don't just want to sort by states, but you probably also want a system to prevent redundant state changing (setting a shader that is already active). The easiest way to do that, for me at least, was to organize the render states into groups with an ID. At which point sorting by id is trivial. Also, depth sorting (from front to back) is important so that you can get early rejection of occluded pixels. If your project is small, you may not notice too much of a difference, but the larger your project gets, the more important such optimizations become.

Typically one would sort by any shader effects (as these are the most exespenive changes). So if 2 meshes (or mesh subsets) use the same shaders then your typically going to want to bind the shader and render both. After sorting by effect, you can sort by other material properties. :-) Hope this helps.

You can reduce fillrate requirements considerably by rendering your opaque objects front-to-back, due to the fact that background pixels get rejected by the z-buffer more often. After this, if you have partially transparent (alpha-blended) objects, render them from back to front.

Fillrate is the most important bottleneck of your graphics hardware in pixel shader-heavy games, and almost all new 3d games are just that.

You can combat software-side bottlenecks by drawing as much as possible with as few calls as possible.