I was just wondering how many triangles are used in like a game like quake3? Cause am I just starting in direct3D, and I made a simple tiled map, each tile (square) is composed of 2 triangles, with a texture applied to that square. And with a map of about 256x256 tiles (131,072 triangles) I only get a frame rate of about 7-9 frames per second on my 750Mhz athlon with 256megs ram and a Voodoo3 2000. This frame rate seems extremely low. The weird thing is, when I zoom in so only about an area of 20x20 tiles are visible on the screen, I get that frame rate. If I zoom out so all of whole map (256x256 tiles) are visible, I get a grame rate of around 13fps. This is when viewed at 1280x1024x16bit resolution. So is this what would be expected? Oh, I also only have 3 different tile textures, each only 64x32 pixels and its 16bit color. So is my pathetic engine just extremely slow or is that what would be expected for that many triangles?

look at the res, thats extreamely high, i dont think noone uses that, make it less

I always use that res I guess for playing age of empires 2 and quake3, in quake3 i get around 40fps at that res.

Possibility

I assume you are not using a culling on those tiles are you? Because Thats all FPS''s are, Great Culling Techneques(?)

Think about it. 256 by 256 is 65,536 tiles. Each tile is made up of two triangles, giving us 131,072 triangles each frame. A typical game is pushing 10,000 triangles per frame maximum. Less is better. From memories of Quake2 map editing, 5,000 triangles per scene was reaching the upper limit. Each polygonal character is generally less than 1,000 triangles. Playstation 2 will be pushing up to a maximum of 50,000 triangles per frame.

The biggest tri count I have played with was a 8,192 by 8,192 map. That created a couple of million triangles. Needless to say the frame rate was measured in minutes, not seconds.

One thing I''ve never really understood. The Voodoo 3 2000''s box states that it does 6 million polygons per second. Now why then would the card choke and sputter on a scene with 131000 (approx) triangles?

Does this mean that video card manufacturers are cheating us? Or do they use some arcane method to calculate the triangles per second?

You can tell I suck at 3D

6 million polygons per second? That''s 6 million polygons that are all single-color flat shaded with no lighting, no textures, completely clipped off the screen, back-faced culled. And even then, that''s only theoretical since the actual bandwidth to the video cards can''t possibly send all the data required for ridiculous triangle-per-second rates like for the GeForce. Also, that is 6 million polygons per second assuming unlimited computer resources - most drawing loops aren''t optimized enough to keep up with a HW accelerator''s theoretical poly limit.

-RWarden (roberte@maui.net)

Let''s try some simple math here:

6million triangles per second / 30 (frames per second) = 200000
polys.

When a card reports Milions of triangles per second it''s taken into account that they are flat shaded, with no lighting. Set up a data structure, texture map everything and you can see that it''s pretty accurate.

OK, your first order of business for speed increases comes from Vertex Buffers. It''s actually really easy to integrate them and just have them hold all your vertex data (you''re already storing it SOMEHOW). Also, since you''re doing a flat plane, you can draw things as a triangle STRIP rather than a triangle LIST, so that''s you''re next improvement. Next up is textures. First, keep ''em small, and perhaps even 8-bit. MipMaps, I found, can speed things up pretty well. Last, but not least, is culling. The fastest triangle is the one you never draw.

Vyvyan
P.S.: Lower your screen resolution!

Yes, lower the resolution. Some of us can only use laptops and 14" monitors.

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