Not quite sure what you're talking about Ruz, hair shaders or alpha? As far as transparency goes very good results can be achieved with shaders at very very low cost. On my 6800gt it is probably a few times faster to use shaders for alpha than things such as ancient vertex alpha you mentioned. If you're talking about hair shaders, there are many of them out there depending on what solution you are looking for. Have you seen the NVidia NALU (mermaid) demo? Thats a nice hair shader. RenderMonkey has a very cool shader example there too, but it probably isnt the style of hair you're looking for. There are tons of ways to simulate hair and if you can write smart shaders they will work on todays hardware. If you just want semi-transparent hair with strands, that's the easiest. You can use an alpha-map on a shader, and you should know that alpha blending or alpha maps in shaders are totally different than the blend modes you have in blitz3d, the only similarity is that there is an alpha map and nothing else.