Sorting of particles

I have a particle system which emits a million particles at the same time. I am using GPU Sort to sort these particles and render them back to front with respect to the user. The particles are traveling at different velocities. I am sorting the particles over multiple frames. I do not want to sort the particles in a single frame as sorting is expensive and I want my application to be real time. So the user sees some artifacts as the particles are sorted gradually. Can anyone suggest a method so that the artifacts could be at the minimum ?

Use additive alpha blending and don’t sort at all.

Playstation1 type sorting

thanks for the solution. Additive alpha blending does give less objectionable but good results.

what do you mean by playstation 1 type sorting ? Could you provide me some links where I can read about it ?

if the particle is screen pixel size, just use depth test is OK. i have rendered transparent volume with particles, it looks good.

http://www.exaflop.org/docs/naifgfx/naifsort.html

http://www.google.bg/search?hl=en&client…%22&btnG=Search

http://hitmen.c02.at/html/psx_faq.html

You might want to order by 1/AverageZ (more like 1000/AverageZ)