Oh and I get about 20fps in the demo, on a Geforce 2 equivalent on an AMD 2400.
I get about 24-32 FPS on a Geforce 4400 128 mb card. P4 2.6c (hyperthreading), 800 FSB and 1 gig DDR 333.
I was more impressed by your original speed test rather then this. The grass has transparancy issues (z order I assume) and becomes more evident as you look from the other side of the lot.
As swift said, use masking rather then alpha transparancies. It will make a big difference, not only in speed, but in look as well.
I'd rather see a less-dense demo that ran at 100 FPS than a crazy-dense demo that runs at 50. Rendering foliage should take a minor part of your rendering time, considering that a real game will probably add another 30,000 polys to the scene.
Same here. With my outdoors stuff I am going to have to take more time doing physics, animation, etc rather than hope that the grass lib leaves me any extra cpu ticks.
Don't mean to cut you down here, just some suggestions. Grass is hard to accomplish, and I think your on the right track. However I would suggest a bit more testing before actually releasing it next time.