On most hardware, indexed triangle lists are the most efficient way to drive the GPU. However, in some cases triangle strips might prove beneficial:

• On some older GPUs, triangle strips may be a bit more efficient to render
• On extremely memory constrained systems, index buffers for triangle strips could save a bit of memory

This library provides an algorithm for converting a vertex cache optimized triangle list to a triangle strip:

std::vector<unsigned int> strip(meshopt_stripifyBound(index_count));
unsigned int restart_index = ~0u;
size_t strip_size = meshopt_stripify(&strip[0], indices, index_count, vertex_count, restart_index);

Typically you should expect triangle strips to have ~50-60% of indices compared to triangle lists (~1.5-1.8 indices per triangle) and have ~5% worse ACMR. Note that triangle strips can be stitched with or without restart index support. Using restart indices can result in ~10% smaller index buffers, but on some GPUs restart indices may result in decreased performance.

To reduce the triangle strip size further, it's recommended to use meshopt_optimizeVertexCacheStrip instead of meshopt_optimizeVertexCache when optimizing for vertex cache. This trades off some efficiency in vertex transform for smaller index buffers.