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NOTE: This Technical Q&A has been retired. Please see the Technical Q&As page for current documentation.

QuickDraw 3D -- Meshes or Patches?

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.

[Jun 01 1995]

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