Which is faster? 1 MD2 or 1 mesh and 1 MD2?

Hello all!
I have a bike. I have an animated MD2 rider. What I want to know is (if anyone has the answer) which is faster:

1) Bike and rider BOTH as a single MD2.
2) Bike as mesh, rider as MD2, child of bike!

Any ideas? I can't SEE any visible difference, but it's hard to tell without building the rest of the game first and I don't want to end up in a position where I find I should have used 1 instead of 2 later on...

:) Thanks!

you would be better off using b3d now puddings B3d pipline supports boned animation.
i was using md2 until that came out. It works rather well.

i was actually going to say the same thing b3d is amazing and really easy on the video card

The big problem for me with b3d animation right now is getting from Max to B3D. The two exporters available both promise animation support in future...

no,you are wrong. The b3d pipleine supports skeletal animation now.

http://www.onigirl.com/pipeline/

Export straight from max to blitz, using cstudio and skin modifier. its very stable too

"which is faster"

The important thing is that the difference is negligible. So do whichever is easier and spend your sweat optimizing somewhere it actually matters.

Podperson, as I recall you might be interested in the b3d exporter for Maya I'm working on right now (if not then ignore this.) Although my initial impulse was to write a plugin to export straight to b3d file format, now I'm trying to use MEL to export to Schuetz's XML file format and use his code to convert to b3d.