drawing a grid - lines or texture?

on a geforce card, that i know cant draw lines as fast as polys, will it be faster to draw a big grid, using two big polygons, with a grid texture to the alpha channel, or is it take really lots of lines to make this method faster than just drawing lines?

[This message has been edited by okapota (edited 03-15-2001).]

If the grid doesn’t contain many lines, then both methods aren’t going to take very long… although if it fills the entire screen, the poly method will burn more fill rate.

or something.

I’m drawing a grid using lines and it seems pretty quick unless you use tons of lines or line stipple. I use a couple of hundred lines and its doesn’t hurt performance on a TNT. However, line stipple really slows it down. I don’t know about line stipple on a geforce, though.

I draw grids using approximately 5000 gridlines - The performance hit seems to be almost negligible, even in software mode.

Chris

I don’t understand why these people have replied in this way…on a geforce, forget using lines. A big textured quad will be far faster than drawing it with lines - I know this for sure.