OpenGL: Are degenerate triangles in a Triangle Strip acceptable outside of OpenGL-ES?

Question

In this tutorial for OpenGL ES, techniques for optimizing models are explained and one of those is to use triangle strips to define your mesh, using "degenerate" triangles to end one strip and begin another without ending the primitive. http://www.learnopengles.com/tag/degenerate-triangles/

However, this guide is very specific to mobile platforms, and I wanted to know if this technique held for modern desktop hardware. Specifically, would it hurt? Would it either cause graphical artifacts or degrade performance (opposed to splitting the strips into separate primitives?)

If it causes no artifacts and performs at least as well, I aim to use it solely because it makes organizing vertices in a certain mesh I want to draw easier.

Answer 1

In addition to the above answers (no it shouldn't hurt at all unless you do something mad in terms of the ratio of real triangles to the degenerates), also note that the newer versions of OpenGL and OpenGL ES (3.x or higher) APIs support a means to insert breaks into index lists without needing an actual degenerate triangle, which is called primitive restart.

https://www.khronos.org/opengles/sdk/docs/man3/html/glEnable.xhtml

When enabled you can encode "MAX_INT" for the index type, and when detected that forces the GPU to restart building a new tristrip from the next index value.