particle accelerating?

Is there a way to accelerate rendering of particles in OpenGL? I just use textured triangle strips for mine… is there some way to speed it up? I heard D3D has a Particle Accelerator… does OGL have one of those? Or is it just made up? heh

Thanks.

The best is to use one triangle per particule - with alpha test to get the proper shape - and to render them with vertex arrays, all at once

ild use a quad instead of one tri ( less fillrate used which is usually more of a killer with particle systems than an extra 33% vertices )

ild draw the quads like so
glDrawArrays( GL_QUADS, … ) (or 2 tris, not a strip/fan though)

u cant use strips cause u will have to call a new array for each particle + theres prolly gonna be lots