With such small triangle counts per primitive, I would suggest using some form of instancing if possible, which could give you the benefits of both worlds.
that was the very first thing i checked, but it requires shaders, and i'm trying to stick with fixed function for maximum compatibility.
i've been working on a design for some game library modules, and came to the conclusion that the whole problem with games is the graphics, they take up too much time. computers are fast enough to model most anything we want for game purposes, but much/most/almost all of the computer's time is spent drawing.
we can draw scenes at the complexity we want, or at the detail we want, but not both yet really.
i don't think there's a graphics programmer out there who wouldn't draw more if they had twice the processing power. I don't think anyone one would say "naw, thats ok, i got enough stuff in my scene".
since apparently graphics cards like to draw lots of triangles at once using the same texture, i was thinking one big buffer wth all the triangles for a texture might be faster.
To be perfectly honest though, nobody can tell you which one will be faster, or by how much. It completely depends on the scene, and the rendering techniques that you are using. You need to attempt each method, and see which one is faster in the given situation - there is no hard rule to go by.
i know what you mean. you would think it wouldn't be that way and that some methods would tend to rise to the top, but like everything else in games there's 6+ ways to do it and it all depends.
looks like i might be spending some quality time with vertex and index buffers.
am i correct in the assumption that i want to copy the vertices one after the other, and add the "vertex base index" of each mesh to its index values?
since i've come to the conclusion that graphics is the problem, i'm going to see what i can do to get some better performance. perhaps even go to shaders and sacrifice some backward compatibility.
its either that, or i don't draw rich environments, or i only draw them out to 50 feet, or i do it all with 2d billboards. : P