Ok this one is for all the GL gurus here.

I've been using OpenGL for quite some time now, but I still consider myself to be somewhat of a beginner as I've really only worked with Ortho drawing out simple textured quads and other simple primitives with blend, rotate and scale effects. Nothing too advanced here.

So with that, could someone tell me how much functions like glEnable()/glDisable(), glAlphaFunc/glBlendFunc(), etc... cost me in performance? Is this easy to tell?

Also, what sorts of tricks can be used to speed things up a bit? I've heard of the use of lists, how much needs to be built up around this technique to make it effective? Please consider that I'm sticking to Ortho(2D) perspective, if that really matters.


An example of where I'm trying to go with this is my game Garland's Quest. I have some nifty lava glow in there, which looks alright, but it slows the dickens out of the whole game. And I mean a lot, I'm sure that there are much better ways to go about said effects as I can play AoE 3 and Tron 2.0 with obviously much better detail and nicer looking graphics and it's amazingly smoother. What am I doing so disgustingly wrong here? :eh: