800 by 600 map with points or quads

[MickeyB]

I want to cover an 800 by 600 space with small dots that touch.  The plan is to control the color of each dot to show terrain height without going 3D.  I tried 4 px by 4px quads and when you render 300, fps drops into the 40's on my dev box.  3000 gl_points is around 90 fps but covers very little of the screen.   Ideas out there.   Not only will I showl height, but pop density, terrain type, etc (one at a time)

[kevglass]

How are you rendering the quads - 300 quads/600 triangles shouldn't really have much impact on a modern card?

Kev

[MickeyB]

Very simple right now.   7600 quads at a h and w of 8  looping and incrementing the x and y so they fill the screen completely.

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[ewjordan]

7600 quads might cause more trouble than 300, but I've definitely seen worse (and I don't think I've ever seen 300 cause a frame rate drop).  How are you doing your drawing calls?  If you're using immediate mode that might be a problem, also any OpenGL state changes between each call could slow things.

[MickeyB]

ok, found I was hoping into Orhto mode quite often, pullled that out.  Alson, generated a list for my quad (not sure if that is needed).  Same frame rate.  About 13-14 fps with 7500 quads.

Any other ideas on a way to go about what I am looking for?  Via data, going to generate a "map" hopefully with very small "tiles" so each tile can be colored based on data, gues like a giant particle system in which every particle is alway "on" to some degree.

EDIT:  I must be doing something very inefficient, upped the tilezise to 32, putting about 485 tiles in the 800*600 and getting 22 fps.  Back to code review.

EDIT: Changed a fill coler to a texture and upped it to 96 FPS....hmmm.