Re: [Mesa3d-users] efficient rendering of spheres without hw accel

[Brian P. <bri...@tu...>]

Benoit Jacob wrote:
> Thanks for your help!
> 
> On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 ran...@nc... wrote:
> 
>>   The shading language is in SW in Mesa and using it
>>cuts the fill-rate a great deal.
> 
> 
> I see. So what is faster, when using Mesa: impostors using the shading
> language, or vertex arrays?

With software rendering, vertex arrays would definitely be faster.

If you were using an OpenGL/Mesa driver that had hardware support for 
the shading language (or vertex/fragment programs) impostors may be 
faster, especially if you want high quality (no visible tesselation).

When asking questions about performance, you need to consider the fact 
that different OpenGL implementations, drivers and hardware may have 
very different performance characteristics.  Even with Mesa, there's a 
lot of different drivers with different features and performance levels.

-Brian