Hi, working on a game, and getting to the stage where I am trying to limit the numbers of polys. Now, i know there aren''t any strictly correct answers to this, but ideas and experiences of others would be helpful. If I am aiming at a system of say a Geforce 2 (I know there are different ones, but this is just a general question so can''t be more specific) with say 190+ ram (not vid ram) and a running speed of around 800 (this is my target machine I think) what would be a good guideline for number of total pols? General ideas are appreciated, thanks.

It depends, ive had that exact system last spring and i made a few load tests on it and found that 30K polys works just fine, you might even go higher.

on the other hand i only had texturemapping so if your going to do some sorts of blending or multitexturing, your in a world of crap with 30K polys

One mark to aim for is the 12K mark of visible/renderd polygons you have in quake3.

Bear in mind that with two linear mipmap linear textures the geforce 2 runs at half speed.

One of my mates managed to run a demo of my terrain engine at about 30-40 fps, rendering about 24K poly''s in two passes ( needs 3 textures, so one duel textured pass, and one single textured pass ), so an effective ~50K polys. This was on a GF2MX.

Death of one is a tragedy, death of a million is just a statistic.

I made a engine with approximately 90000 ployz showing at once, and i had about 80fps at my machine, amd 2200+, geforce ti4600, 512 ddr ram. A friend of my who got a Amd 1400mhz, geforce3 and 256mb ram got about 30fps. With a 800mhz and voodoo 5, it will show about 10fps/second.