Source and normals

MagnificentMicrowave

Does anyone know whether hard edges made with vertex normals are faster in Source than just cutting the geometry at the said edge?
The latter would be much, much faster and easier to do in my current workflow, but I'd like to know whether that has any price in performance. (I heard that sometimes engines just cut up the mesh at the hard edges anyway so it's still rendering duplicate verts)

passerby

makes no difference, once you export to smd and compile, it will split verts with hard normals.

EarthQuake

Manually detaching faces is a really bad idea when working on the model, it will mess up your normal map projection.

MagnificentMicrowave

I'm not gonna use normal maps for this so it's fine. Thanks.