Many games, even on current "next-gen" hardware, render particles using camera facing quads. In his Intel-supported Visual Computing piece, veteran coder Mike Krazanowski (Tomb Raider: Anniversary) suggests a neat alternative solution using pixel shaders and a little bit of math.

Though rendering particles using camera facing quads has been a practice employed in games for many years, Krazanowski's method uses shader technology to "give a more accurate visual representation of the simulated volumes as well as potentially decrease the necessary number of particles, which in turn will help to improve render performance."

According to Krazanowski, shaders have served as a significant advancement for the software developer's ability to define the functions used to render a scene in the hardware: "Even on cheap consumer graphics hardware, the software developer can define almost any function imaginable (usually only limited by available registers and functions made available to the shading language)."

He continues: "Using pixel shaders, render-to-texture technology and a little bit of math, I claim that we can more correctly simulate the volumes that the particles were intended to represent."