good fps rain

Hi everyone;
I need a (fairly) good rain effect for my game that doesn't kill too much fps, and this is a challenge because I'm running my game on 1024*768 resolution, and it doesn't like overlaying sprites too much. Also, the camera is sometimes moving very fast, so if the rain sprites are created above the camera, they will already be behind it before they can come into view. right now, I have the raindrops created all around the camera to compensate for this, but still many of the drops are "wasted", because they are behind the camera and not visible.
Any ideas?

i would try something like that: http://www.coniserver.net/wiki/index.php/Basic_Rain/Snow_Effect

Thanks, ventilator, that's exactly what I was thinking of. Guess I was just to lazy to script it myself, the weather box and everything