Rendering triangle meshes with OpenGL

["Miguel A. Osorio" <maos@gbl.com.br>]

Hey people,




	I found out that, currently, the performance bottleneck in my
application (a simple 3D engine) is the graphics pipeline. What got me
wondering is my triangle mesh rendering buiseness. This is how I got it
working: I read 3D models from ASE files (ASCII Scene Export from
3DSMax) and, as some of you might well know, it's a very simple format
-> a list of all vertices and the list of all triangles, which reference
the vertices by means of indexes. So all I do then is compile a display
list for each model, something like:

glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES);

	for(i=0; i < NumberOfFaces; ++i) {

		// Vertex one
		glTexCoord2dv(bla bla);
		glNormal3dv(bla bla);
		glVertex3dv(bla bla);

		// Vertex two
		(...)
	
		// Vertex three
		(...)

	}

glEnd();


	Thing is, I'd like to know if this way of doing it is ok in terms of
performance, if this could be the cause of my slowdown. I know there are
more efficient ways of doing this, like for instance, pre-processing the
geometric data and converting everything to triangle strips, but is the
presented way a bit too slow?



Thank you for your attention,
Miguel A. Osorio.