Particle System speed

I’m trying to create a particle system… and I have a question about speed.

is there any difference in speed if I do any of this examples:

  1. use one triangle with texture and then use glTranslatef() to move and render that single triangle to every Particle place

  2. create a bunch of triangles at the place that they will be render.

is there any difference? will glTranslatef() be to slow or something?

Alternative number 2 will be much faster. You can’t make a glTranslate call inside a begin/end so if you do it that way you’ll have to hand feed each particle to OpenGL with the CPU. You might want to read this .

ok thanks