unused verts eat rendertime?

Wings just discovered that a mesh with vertices and without any triangles will noless take some render time. I have tested it in Blitz3D and can confirm it takes about 50% of the rendering time of a mesh for the vertices only!

I assume this is not a Blitz but a Directx or Card problem. So I´m afraid we can´t fix this. Any information?

Of course it will still take time. The vertex array is being sent to the graphics card and transformed.

Yeah, this is why it is a good rule of thumb to keep your meshes clean and free of unused verts and combine as many verts into 2 or more tris as much as possible.

sent to the graphics card, ok. But why do they resend it each frame? doesn't make sense to me.

Makes sense to me. The GFX card just gets a whole bunch of vertices to transform. How is it supposed to know which aren't actually being used by tris, and filter them out?

You're thinking about fill rate when a card actually draws, thats why you got confused with invisible verts. For each vertex, the card has to do all this cos and sin stuff.

Ok I see, thanks.

>>jfk: sent to the graphics card, ok. But why do they resend it each frame? doesn't make sense to me.

(in theory, not Blitz or Wings specific..) It depends how you send them, or if you have processor animated meshes.. static or dynamic meshes. There is way to send static meshes just once but gpu still needs to transform them every frame. Takes still some time but saves transfer time (mem -> agp/pci-e -> gfx-mem)