Take the 2-minute tour ×  I need to speed up some particle
system eye candy I'm working on. The eye candy involves additive
blending, accumulation, and trails and glow on the particles. At
the moment I'm rendering by hand into a floating point image
buffer, converting to unsigned chars at the last minute then
uploading to an OpenGL texture. To simulate glow I'm rendering
the same texture multiple times at different resolutions and
different offsets. This is proving to be too slow, so I'm
looking at changing something. The problem is, my dev hardware
is an Intel GMA950, but the target machine has an Nvidia GeForce
8800, so it is difficult to profile OpenGL stuff at this stage.
I did some very unsientific profiling and found that most of the
slow down is coming from dealing with the float image: scaling
all the pixels by a constant to fade them out, and converting
the float image to unsigned chars and uploading to the graphics
hardware. So, I'm looking at the following options for
optimization:    • Replace fl