I was trying to add a console (like a quake console) into one of my programs but when any more than around 100 quads (ie the text of the console) were rendered it slowed down heaps. As far as I can tell I am drawing the console the same way as GLQuake (each letter is a texture mapped quad), but when I run GLQuake on my computer their console (and game) runs fine, whereas my console slows everything down. Should I try placing the rendering in a vertex array? Also how much CPU is used when lots of polygons are given to opengl to render but they aren''t in the view port? Thanx, aDc

A hundred quads shouldn''t slow your program down very much even if you''re not using vertex arrays.

There shouldn''t be much more CPU utilization if you send polygons to OpenGL that aren''t visible. However you''ll want to avoid to this because if you don''t send them at all it will be faster.

Are you using Voodoo 1/2? If you must make sure that nothing is rendered outside the visible screen, otherwise the card ''chokes'' and your program will slow down a lot.