Converting DX8 to DX9 a work in progress

[Mikle]

I hope my english is more easy to read now for you in the translation tool Google.

Yes!
I sent example to your mail, but the reply I will write here because it might be interesting to someone else.
Little performance over DOOM3 not caused by application VB6, D3DX8Mesh makes a lot of excess on each call.
This is not a universal tool, ready to convert models, this is an example, which converts this particular model.
On my computer, my example shows 1300 fps, the video card - GF260GTX, screen - 1680 * 1050, the rest is not important.
I did not import the materials from your model, if you combine all the textures in the atlas of 1024 * 1024, and designate each material point of the corresponding color, the performance still grow up.
Not necessarily use the Progressive meshes, you can do several LODs (Level of Detail) with 3DS Max and each level convert separately.
Transparent polygons do require sorting, there may be different types of optimization according to the scene.
For example, on the tables in the room are 50 aquariums, each of 50 polygons. Instead of sorting the 2,500 polygons, you can sort only 50 aquariums and aquarium store for Model 3 .. 4 pre-sorted index buffer, and choose the buffer, which is more suitable.
The games use clipping the geometry that is not visible, this is different methods - frustum culling, portals. Game space is divided by quadtree or octree.
For a set of small objects, such as bullets and fragments can be unnecessary after the separation with octree collect the required one vertex buffer. To do it in every frame, and it will increase the speed.
That is a lot of techniques, to experiment, to choose suitable.
The performance in VB6 is quite high, in a pinch you can make the slowest fragments in DLL for C++. This may be procedure sorted or passage octree.