Oh, don't I know it...
Mirroring, all go.
Scaling and distortion, no problem.
Rotation, looks great.
Alpha transpareny, lovely.
Vertex colours, not as good as palettes but surprisingly versatile nonetheless, and a heck of a lot better than nothing.
And don't forget you have the not-to-be-underrated subpixel accuracy. Like for eg, the moons in platypus moved really slowly, so it was really noticeable when they "clicked" over onto the next pixel. Not so with 3d; it interpolates the whole thing beautifully, and you get super-smooth, imperceptibly slow motion.
Plus the whole thing, while being not quite so backwards compatible, is at least more future-proofed... and safe from things like the nvidia driver fiasco.
I wouldn't recommend using triangles though - you'll waste 50% of your vidram, and the increased fill area is likely to kill off any benifits you might see. Though I think the major bottleneck is usually in reconstructing the mesh every frame, rather than polygon count or (unless you're going really crazy), fill rate. 3000 polys vs 1500 polys isn't that big a deal to a 3d card. Hacking around with mesh geometry, they don't seem to like quite so much.
Mirroring, all go.
Scaling and distortion, no problem.
Rotation, looks great.
Alpha transpareny, lovely.
Vertex colours, not as good as palettes but surprisingly versatile nonetheless, and a heck of a lot better than nothing.
And don't forget you have the not-to-be-underrated subpixel accuracy. Like for eg, the moons in platypus moved really slowly, so it was really noticeable when they "clicked" over onto the next pixel. Not so with 3d; it interpolates the whole thing beautifully, and you get super-smooth, imperceptibly slow motion.
Plus the whole thing, while being not quite so backwards compatible, is at least more future-proofed... and safe from things like the nvidia driver fiasco.
I wouldn't recommend using triangles though - you'll waste 50% of your vidram, and the increased fill area is likely to kill off any benifits you might see. Though I think the major bottleneck is usually in reconstructing the mesh every frame, rather than polygon count or (unless you're going really crazy), fill rate. 3000 polys vs 1500 polys isn't that big a deal to a 3d card. Hacking around with mesh geometry, they don't seem to like quite so much.