i want to know if many of you use vertex arrays in opengl or would recommend me doing so.. do they have much of a performance increase over just calling glvertex over and over again? are they supported by most 3d cards?

By indexing into a vertexarray when rendering triangles you don''t send the same vertex to the card over and over again.

As such the driver is free to transform the vertices once and only once per frame, which gives a huge performance increase if you have many vertices.

If the card don''t support vertexarrays then the card isn''t worth supporting =). It''s not a card issue, it''s a driver issue. (Unless you use GeForce which do the transformation on the card and not in the driver =)