Masking vs alpha. Performance increase?

Hey, i'm making a texture for some fencing, a wiremesh kind of thing. Tried all sorts of options, but masking just doesn't look as good as alpha.

I know jfk says about using dds textures, so i'm doing that. But, at a distance it just doesn't look great. The fencing seems to almost disappears, and look grainy. But with alpha it looks great.

ANYWAY, just off hand, is it much of a performance hit using alpha texture blending on the fencing, rather than masking? I'm going to have a fair bit of this, but i suppose i can hide fence sections that are obscured.

Anyone? :o)

just do it (if you have only a fair bit). i would go with masked dds though. just because of several alpha-z-ordering problems... especially when using smokeparticles, fog and all that stuff. in my game is just switched my decal system from alpha to masked dds (due to the mentioned problems).
i did not notice any speed difference though...

Ok, thanks man. As i say, the masked look ok close up, but from a distance it did go all grainy on me.

you can use mipmaps with dds textures (i use nvidias PS-plugin). i think this would help you out.

Ah, i thought blitz auto generated them. thanks :o)

with dds, blitz doesn't generate them. you have to create the mipmaplevels by hand (using this plugin or atis texture compression tool)