Display List

Hi,

I am writing a scene-viewer for Maya and wanted to use display-list for rendering. What I am wondering: What actually do display-lists and what don´t they do? If I have my Mesh stored with independend arrays for Vertices, UVs and so on and do something like:
for(all the polygons in my Mesh)
{
glBegin(GL_POLYGON);
for(unsigned int i=0; i<poly.numVertices(); ++i)
{
glVertex3f(vertexList[poly[i]]);
}
glEnd();
}

will the display-List actually convert this to something like:
…
glBegin(GL_POLYGON);
glVertex3f(0.0f,0.0f,0.0f);
glVertex3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f);
glVertex3f(1.0f,1.0f,0.0f);
glVertex3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f);
glEnd();
glBegin(GL_POLYGON);
glVertex3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f);
glVertex3f(1.0f,0.0f,1.0f);
glVertex3f(2.0f,0.5f,1.0f);
glVertex3f(1.0f,1.0f,1.0f);
glVertex3f(0.0f,1.0f,1.0f);
glEnd();
…
Or will it even further optimize, so it will recognize whether I only draw a triangle, quad or n-shaped Polygon?

I am not looking for the absolute maximum in Performance, since I need to support n-sided Polygons anyway.
Also, will display-list give me any drawbacks when I don´t want to alter the vertex-Positions after I created the mesh (except for bone-animation which will be performed using a vertex-program)

Case

Hi !

Everything you render is saved in the displaylist in the same way as you execute it, but in a more optimized format, it is also normally saved in video memory, this makes it possible to render faster as you don’t need to move everything from the CPU’s memory to video memory each time.

It will not convert triangles into strips or fans or anything like this, you have to do that yourself.

Mikael