Hi, I am working on a new concept, which will be a sports simulation game, with models walking around, and you click them, tell them to go eat, weight train, go for a run, practice, you get the idea. Just wondering, if I want to get 30 characters possibly on screen at once (whole team and staff) how many polys should I aim for per character. If I am aiming for it to be playable on something around say a radeon 9700 and better. I am really asking for those with experience to give me some feedback on their findings. Currently I have 11 3,000 poly characters, animated, running around, but getting a fps of around 10 when they are all on the screen together on a 9500 pro, which uses a similar spec to a base 9700. For this project I can prevent the user getting too close, (thinking of a similar view to The Sims, but slightly further out to allow a view of more of the sports complex) so I can lower the polys quite a bit, but I am looking for advice from someone who has tried having lots of characters onscreen at once, with the poly count they recommend to accomodate decent looks at a decent draw speed. We have a new model, not yet animated, of 920 pols. You can save us a lot of hassle of rigging and animating him if you can tell me right now that is too many or way too low a poly limit on modern hardware, considering the number of characters I am looking at having on screen.

Depends a lot on how the models will be renderd and animated. Will you use keyframed or skined characters. Will you use fancy pixel/vertex shaders?

33,000 polygons to me seems like maybe the rendering needs some sort of optimization. I mean to say that if that you only have that amount of polys on the screen, but on that high of a video card, I could be wrong but it seems like the render function may be too slow. The card should be able to render that faster than 10 fps. How are you rendering the models? Are you doing anything GPU or CPU intensive. Are you doing it in immediate mode or with vertex arrays?

800-1K characters will to, 3000 polys is a bit mutch if the view is like sims but a bit zoomed out.

I think you could go as low as 500 polys if you want to.

I bet you do way to many batches for every frame, try placing all your character textures in one big texture and then render all characters in one go with out any begin/end inbetween.

Hi,

I don't think character poly counts is or should be an exact science. The characters should meet a minimum visual quality that you arrive at yourself I would say and then you can optimise for that. Profiling your application to find the bottlenecks is almost a must.

If you find after optimizing your renering pipeline as much as possible, that you're still not achieving the performance you require, eg 60 FPS, then you can look at simplifying the characters to squeeze more speed out. Perhaps using LOD, or rougher animation for distant characters etc.

IMHO it's better to aim for a specific frame rate, and then scale the visual quality accordingly until you meet that requirement rather than say "I want my characters to be ## thousand polys and the game to run smoothly". By their very nature characters could be all sorts of different poly counts. Also as lc_overlord kinda said, the type of game or simply the view point will heavily influence the need for character detail.

Just my thoughts and opinions :)

GCoder

Quote: Original post by GCoder
Profiling your application to find the bottlenecks is almost a must.

I also suggest you that. 33k polys are definetly enough but should not give you 10fps. I've reached over 60fps on my GF4Ti with 35k tris, and the average batch size was much lower.
Are you sure you're sending the data correctly?
By the way, I hardly believe there's a point in going lower than 1ktri per model on today's hardware.
Just as a reference, performance on a GeForce 2 continues to rise almost linearly up to 10M tri per batch. So, you may not save really much when lowering triangles.
Considering the framerate, I want to do a sanity check...
Are you using immediate mode or standard vertex arrays?

Quote: Original post by Krohm

Quote: Original post by GCoder
Profiling your application to find the bottlenecks is almost a must.

I also suggest you that. 33k polys are definetly enough but should not give you 10fps. I've reached over 60fps on my GF4Ti with 35k tris, and the average batch size was much lower.
Are you sure you're sending the data correctly?
By the way, I hardly believe there's a point in going lower than 1ktri per model on today's hardware.
Just as a reference, performance on a GeForce 2 continues to rise almost linearly up to 10M tri per batch. So, you may not save really much when lowering triangles.
Considering the framerate, I want to do a sanity check...
Are you using immediate mode or standard vertex arrays?

Exactly my point. Something appears to be wrong if you get 10fps only drawing 33,000 tris.

I'm sure it has little to do with the triangle count and everything to do with the way the skinning/animating is being done.

Drawing 33k triangles, and drawing 33k animating triangles is probably significantly different.