What's better, triangulated mesh or quad mesh?

[Ghoti]

Hi folks,

don't know if this is common knowledge but i was wondering, if i want to render a box using quads or triangles, which is faster?

does the same apply for more complex objects?

greets ghoti

[Raphael]

The PSP GU does not have quad primitives, so the question is redundant. Also PSPGL only emulates Quads, if at all, by triangles.
As for triangles, the fastest setup should probably be a triangle fan then triangle strip.

[chp]

Fans vs. strips is probably an even race, since they both fetch only one vertex per triangle. Fans however gets really messy since you can't really restart on a new location so you'd have to kick each separately, but with a triangle strip you can insert a degenerate triangle to start drawing from a new location in the same call.

[Ghoti]

Hi thanks for the reply,

i indeed see that quads are not supported, guess i made a mistake. however i have one question though:

i wanted to know if just rendering triangles is that much slower as trianglestrips and if so, which model format is as easy to read as an obj model file or just a little bit more difficult? The obj files i create using maya creates triangles and not trianglestrips so i can't use that if i want it as fast as i like.

any ideas?

[Insert_witty_name]

I render triangles from an obj file.

It's fast enough for any purpose.

[Ghoti]

fast enough but is it also the fastest, because when you make a 3d game you can always use some extra resources.

[danzel]

I've been working with some 2d rendering code recently.
Rendering my sprites using a triangle strip gets 30fps, while rendering my sprites using two triangles each only gets 20fps, so yeah there is some speed difference between em. probably won't be as big as this though.