Bus traffic between the graphics subsystem and memory can be- come a bottleneck when rendering geometrically complex meshes. In this paper, we investigate the use of vertex caching to transpar- ently reduce geometry bandwidth. Use of an indexed triangle strip representation permits application programs to animate the meshes at video rates, and provides backward compatibility on legacy hard- ware. The efficiency of vertex caching is maximized by reorder- ing the faces in the mesh during a preprocess. We present two reordering techniques, a fast greedy strip-growing algorithm and a local optimization algorithm. The strip-growing algorithm per- forms lookahead simulations of the cache to adapt strip lengths to the cache capacity. The local optimization algorithm improves this initial result by exploring a set of perturbations to the face ordering. The resulting cache miss rates are comparable to the efficiency of the earlier mesh buffer scheme described by Deering and Chow, even though the vertex cache is not actively managed.