   [DX9] Off-screen sprites
  On to my most recent conundrum...I will start off with a brief sketch of my current design. I have a list of actors. Each actor can be drawn onto the screen as a 2D sprite. I have the following options: A) Draw all the actors in the list, including those which are currently off-screen. B) Perform a check on all actors in the list, and draw only those who fall within the 'visible area' (which in my case is the entire screen area).The reason I am seeking your advice is that I am unsure as to which approach will result in the best performance. Although option (A) is the quickest and easiest to implement, I am not sure as to whether it will yield the better performance... unless DX is capable of automatically identifying whether a draw operation will result in an off-screen draw, and therefore waste no time in drawing the sprite. I know that this is the case with the 3D rendering pipeline (polygons are clipped to the viewport, and only the viewable vertices are drawn), but I am not sure if this also applies when I am drawing sprites.I know that I could implement both methods and compare them, but I figured, why should I do this when I can get a good indication from this forum? ;)   
  Assuming you mean ID3DXSprite, they're rendered as 3D objects as well, so will be culled in the same way.If you have a lot of offscreen sprites, you may gain some performance by only drawing the visible ones though, since it'll mean your vertex / index buffer can be smaller, which means less data to transfer to the GPU.Personally, I wouldn't bother doing clipping manually unless it's effectively free to do (I.e. you're going through all your sprites anyway), or you know it's a performance problem.   ;  Yes, when I say sprite I mean that I am drawing textures using the ID3DXSprite interface.Ok then, I will just stick to calling the draw method for all my actors. If I understood you correctly, DX should not waste any time drawing those actors which happen to be off-screen. The performance I would gain from implementing option A (see my first post) would be negligible.Thanks again :)   ;  I am not sure but there might be a bit of buffer time because it sends it to the GPU.A simple if x > screenX y > screenY and x+width < 0 and y+height < 0 is virtually free and can be done in the draw call as first thing and just send a return;I think it's an easy and good enough method to clip things :)   