about how many polygons would be acceptable on the screen at a time. I know that polygons aren’t the only thing taking performance, i just want a few pointers. What would be acceptable for an older computer? a fairly new one and a newer “gaming” computer?
Ludum dare is in a week, and i don’t really have the time to accumulate experience with poly-counting (yeah, as you can probably guess, this also means that you can look forwards to crappy graphics by me, yeey!)
Hopefully will see some of you there! =D
Poly count is rarely the bottleneck these days for modern computers (iPhone and other mobile devices are a different story). More important things to watch out for are draw calls, overdraw, fillrate, and texture memory usage.
That being said, triangle budget is still something to be aware of of course.
A Ethan said, it depends on the platform. You’re unlikely to overload a desktop machine with a large number of polygons, but using lots of materials will reduce performance significantly. There is a good manual page about optimising graphics performance here.
Thats a very tricky question because it completely depends on the multitude of hardware configurations each one of those computers has in those three categories.
It also depends on how many lights there are (are they dynamic, vertex, or baked) and what types of shaders that are in use, etc.
But if you want a general guideline (and I mean general, meaning it can vary greatly)
Polys on Screen at any moment:
Older (or weaker computer): Anywhere between 10,000 to 50,000+ tris.
Mid range computer: Anywhere between 30,000 to 100,000+ tris.
Top of the line (Absolutely brand new hardcore gaming computer): Anywhere between 100,000 to 500,000+ tris.
Pfft. Sure, if you’re top of the line hardware was made in 2004.
I have an nVidia 8800GT (a 2007 card) in my machine and it can churn out around 3 mil tris at just above 30 fps (draw calls are around 1000) with a 1280x800 screen res. That’s within a Unity scene (in editor), on Mac OSX 10.6.4 Mac Pro.
A top end gaming rig will push a few million polygons, but you’ll want multipass shaders, a few post processing effects and lot other eye candy features for that money.
There is plenty of other things that’ll grind any system to a halt with a lot of polygons, physics and per-vertex animation like bone weights and cloth, etc.
For a reasonable detailed gun, I’d say 1-5k tris.
Normal mapped from something with Millions!
It’s the silhouette that gives the poly count away, especially rounded parts. A good 3d artist can make it look x2 or x3 the actual number.
Thats why I put the “+” after those numbers. That way if someone came across the post and if I said 3 million, and they then modeled a 3mil tri scene and added a bunch of dynamic lights and expensive shaders it would grind to a halt.
At least this way it was somewhat in a safe zone taking into account they’d go crazy with dynamic lights and shaders. lol
I guess I should have mentioned that my scene in question has over 20 point lights with soft shadows and a directional light with soft shadows. It also has sun shafts and vignetting post effects and cloth physics.
Also, if they modelled a 3 million tri scene without taking into account the other effects and lights being used, then they don’t know about the game engine they’re building for. I was talking about 3 million tris total, not just the raw scene geometry.
(yeah, as you can probably guess, this also means that you can look forwards to crappy graphics by me, yeey!)
