I have an object that leaves a trail of smoke in the form of textured, blended quads that are rotated to face the viewer, and scaled according to how long they have been in existence. When I get close to these quads, so that they are taking up a large amount of the screen, my framerate drops tons. Can anyone tell me why this is? Is it the blending, or something else? The blending is done as per the stars tut here at nehe. thanks for your help!

Yeah its from the blending, look at it as how many pixels you are having to blend. When you''re far away your blending a few, when you''re close your blending a lot.