While a GeForce 7800 GS can easily handle 100,000 polygons, it needs to have all of those polygons in one batch. That means they all have to be in the same node for maximum performance.
When you have multiple nodes, Panda has to send each node to the graphics hardware as a separate batch of polygons (because the nodes might move independently, or have different state changes on them). Modern graphics hardware hasn’t made any improvements recently in handling large numbers of batches, just in handling large numbers of polygons per batch. So if you have a lot of nodes with only a handful of polygons per node, your frame rate will suffer. This problem is not specific to Panda; any graphics engine will have the same problem–it’s due to the nature of the PC and the AGP bus.
But there’s a workaround. If you intend all of these boxes to just sit around and be part of the background, or to move as a single unit, you can flatten them all together into a handful of nodes (or even one node). To do this, parent them all to the same node, and use:
node.flattenStrong()There are also flattenLight() and flattenMedium(), which have different effects, and each is appropriate at certain times. I don’t want to get into a whole lecture on scene graph optimizing right now, but in general, flattenStrong() will do the best it can to collapse nodes together.
One thing that flattenStrong() won’t touch is geometry under a ModelRoot or ModelNode node. Since each egg or bam file loads itself up under a ModelRoot node, you will have to get rid of that node first if you want the geometry from multiple different egg files to be flattened together. You can do that with something like this:
modelRoot = loader.loadModel('myModel.egg')
newModel = NodePath('model')
modelRoot.getChildren().reparentTo(newModel)David