Display lists are the Bees Knees! But...

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax OpenGL Programming/Display lists are the Bees Knees! But...

I have a question about them.

Without using display lists, you would group all of your
"glbegin gl_Quads" and your "glbegin gl_Points" together.
This is faster because glbegin is an expensive call. Do display
lists negate this effect?

Chris C

i wouldnt worry to much about grouping them...
the potential speed increase (if noticable) could be offset by the complexity of trying to group all your quads and points together...

Dubious Drewski

I had that thought put in my head by this guy

glBegin and glEnd can be expensive calls in tight loops. If you have an object containing a polygon and, say a line (to indicate its normal?), it would be better to have two loops: first one for drawing all the polygons in the object and second one to draw all the lines in the objects, rather than calling glBegin and glEnd 4 times in one loop each iteration

He himself questioned it though. So it probably isn't true.

Ok then. Good to know.

ImaginaryHuman

He's talking about tight loops ie small loops where you are going to have almost as many glbegin/glend calls as actual polygons.

AntMan - Banned in the line of duty.

Display lists are a alot faster because they store all the required data on the gpu in video memory. Nvidia cards render display lists faster than any other form of gl rendering.