What do you suggest? Display lists or vertex buffering (via ATI's VAO or whatever)?
I recently discovered the power of display lists by comparing two methods of rendering a >500k polygon heightmapped terrain mesh. The first method was just simply generating each vertex on the fly -- which resulted in 22 fps. The second method used a display list, which sent my framerate up to a whopping 140 fps! Pretty significant! I'm just wondering if it would be wise to use VAO for this. Even if I use a really sparted vertex, with only 3 component coordinate and normal/colour vectors, that's 6 MB of vertex data for a 512x512 heightmap.
I recently discovered the power of display lists by comparing two methods of rendering a >500k polygon heightmapped terrain mesh. The first method was just simply generating each vertex on the fly -- which resulted in 22 fps. The second method used a display list, which sent my framerate up to a whopping 140 fps! Pretty significant! I'm just wondering if it would be wise to use VAO for this. Even if I use a really sparted vertex, with only 3 component coordinate and normal/colour vectors, that's 6 MB of vertex data for a 512x512 heightmap.
