Technical Q&As
QD3D 20 - QuickDraw 3D -- Meshes or Patches? (1-June-95)
Q Does QuickDraw 3D prefer Meshes or Patches? Which kind of data yields better
performance? Is it useful to export Patches, perhaps with the graphic
accelerator?
A Meshes are meant for editing (they are very convenient when editing vertices),
but they take quite a bit of memory, so the tradeoff is time versus space.
Patches are more convenient for dealing with surfaces as a whole and for
representing surfaces at different tesselations.
Although Meshes exhibit better performance than Patches in the first version of
QuickDraw 3D, it is possible that later versions will have improved Patch
performance. In the meantime, consider experimenting with the tesselation
factor for your Patches, since over-tesselating reduces performance.
Technical Q&As
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