or if you set a shade-c shader for grass models, their creation could be slower than without shade-c.

imo runtime seeding is not a fine thing, especially if you run 300 functions with 300 wait(1);, it slows downs things, it's better to keep performance for your characters...

as above mentioned, alpha testing instead of alpha blending helps, or simply set OVERLAY, it is the fastest (grass does not have to have nice border pixel fade out), and using larger grass models (e.g. 6-8 models merged) with very early clipping (max 1000 quants) and lod can be a solution. just take the large grass models from my editor to test it, it's free. I could achieved good fps by them beside using shade-c 0.90 water (running only the corresponding parts of refraction, reflection, dof). and set them UNLIT, it also results in a great boost. in this case you have to tweak their material colours properly, and have to play with alphatransparency value and shadow alpha to get proper shadows. and use vertex wind animation for only the first lod of them.

I'm a bit sleepy (wake up time 4:45), I just hope I wrote no stupid things