Hello there,
I’ve studied several methods on making particle effects but when i tried in my pc (AMD 1ghz) Video 64 MB, still my fps drop down…so that does anyone know a simple method on generating particle effects effectively?
I think there’s an extension that can speed up particle rendering, it’s called something like point sprites. There was a demo about the extension at http://www.delphi3d.net some time ago.
However, if you’re thinking about particle rendering in the movie industry one-pixel-particle way, it’s going to be slow no matter what you do. For realtime apps you will have to use larger and fewer particles. It’s a good idea to texture those particles, that way you can get visually ok results with larger particles too. It all depends on the effect you’re trying to achieve.
-Ilkka
first of all: make your framework for the particle system efficient. maybe your framerate drops just because of too much overhead. use simple arrays to store the particles, try not to use any linked lists or fancy stuff, it sure is neat but slows down a lot. don’t draw so-called “poor-man’s billboards”, use real billboards instead (i could give you my code, just email to robert.mayster@monocom.com). try tu use big, textured quads for the particles, vertex arrays can speed up rendering further, since you have only one function call per frame for gl-rendering (otherwise it would be one call per particle).
bigger, well-textured particles are always a better choice than small, odd-textured ones.
greetz, stalker.