A bit on the software engineering side, but here it goes anyways.... I am interested in what the next wave of games have chosen as their target systems (PII/III 9000ghz, 1TB memeory, 4TB HD, 4D 512MB stereo video card, Linux kernal 4.3) and what polygon budget is reasonalbly expected to be pushed by the target system? How do you determine your polygon budget? Do you be sneaky and target it too low, knowing the art and engine team will go over anyways?

Well, it really depends on when you plan to have the game finished and whether it is targeted a low-end machines or high-end machines.

Hardware gets double the speed in 18 months so if you plan to have something done in 18 months you should do what you can with our machine now and then expect the frame rate to double before your release. You should of course to this will a high-level machine of today if you target high-level machines.

Jacob Marner

They also seem to double in price every 6mo as well . Anyways the easy part is the baseline system - you meerly pick one as far as I can tell. The hard part is figuring out the poly budget. I know graphics cards have a ''max polygons per second'' rating, but that is done from the manufacturers point of view and not from a reality point of view. Reality in the sense that the max polygon through put is real only if you are rendering the exact scene used to determine this max poly throgh put. How do you determine the real world max poly through put?