Well Now, I have made quite a few 3D Models and recentley thanx to the help from this forum finally found out the size of these models in polys. Now looking at some Q3 models that were on average 900 polys and reading some articles I started thinking that my MP5 model of 7,000 polys or my Glock of 5,000 ploys were quite large. So I was wondering is this large for a game. And how many polys can actually be displayed at a decent speed on a computer. Can anyone help? STVOY Pyre Light Studios (Under Construction) Edited by - STVOY on February 12, 2002 6:43:32 PM

I''ll try and keep this simple:

Each polygon that ends up on the screen carries with it some overhead. They have to be transformed to the right position, lit correctly, perhaps shadowed, and textured with as many material layers as specified.

Depending on which of the above components are being applied to each poly, and the hardware that''s processing them all - that''s your factor.

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5000 polys for one model is a lot for games today

I''m currently working on an X-Box / PSX2 game. Now, consider an X-Box is arounf nv17 level, so that''s mid Geforce2, and slightly pre-Geforce3.

X-Box, we don''t exceed 20,000 per frame very often, and when we do, it *never* exceeds 25,000. The engine is graphically tailored to be a quick port, not a high-performance platform specific solution. This manes, that once you''ve done your world geometry, BSP and weapon, if you want five bad guys on a screen at once, they need to be around 1,500 polys. Weapons, 800 - 1200 I''d say...and remember, this is post Geforce2 technology...

PSX2...as before, with a quick-port solution, it''s more like 12,000 per frame, peaking at 15,000. So, characters are around 800 - 1000, and weapons are approx. 500 - 900, no more.

Hope this helps you get your artwork into perspective.

A really great game artist can create models seemingly as good as another guy''s, with less polys. Period.

-Spiral

While this reply is mostly right, but a weapon of over 400 polys?? that is going way overboard. around 150 should be plenty, and probably too much. Concentrate on good textures and an optimized model. i think STVOY, if your weapon models are that high, stay away from the mesh smooth modifier.
Also as a side note, to say that the Xbox is around nv17 is not very accurate IMHO, some features surpass the geforce3 (two vertex shaders for example), equal it (T&L), and others lag behind.

also, most ppl fail to realize that its fill rate and number of vertices that impact the performence and not polygons. i could have 1000 polygons kill the performence easily. just make them the fill a large screen. or i could make a ps2 (heh, great marketing by sony) push 66 million polys by not transforming them, turning off all effects, use flat shading, no textures, and drawing the same polygon at a small size on the screen. its all in how you actually render them that makes a difference not the number of them.

btw your models are EXTREMLY large. do some optimizations. rmeber textures are supposed to do fine detail NOT the polygons.

Nah!.. is correct 1000 poly is the common. BUT ALWAYS DEPEND THE GAME. For example, Dead Or Alive 2, it show only 2 models at once, plus the scenenary, then you can use a more complex models using 3000 o 5000 polygons. Also, Resident Evil show only 2 or 3 models at once, so the numbers of polygons can be more that 1000. In opposite, Quake3 can show 2-6 models at once so this need to show a low-poly.



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"Cuando se es peon, la unica salida es la revolución"

Actually, the X-Box is more closely related to the nv25 chip. I believe someone at nVidia had "classified" it as something around an nv27. Something between the GeForce 4 and the next GPU coming out.

haha, over the geforce 4??! thats a good one. so i guess microsoft is willing to loose about 400 dollars per system they sell? right... if you want to know the truth then read about it from the guy that knows all.


http://www6.tomshardware.com/consumer/02q1/020204/

Well Now,

Thanx for the help people. Just to add a little background my game has 2D backgrounds like resident evil and so will just be a bitmap in OpenGL. So theres only the character and their gear plus some objects, no World 3D. I did manage to take out most of the internal workings of the gun that were being used for animation purposes this brought it down to 3,000 polys. I also noticed lighting was accountable for some of the those but I can''t really take that out.

I had a look at Q3 and UT games closely and noticed that the weapons mostly very smooth and very simple, in some cases not more than a few cylinders with slits in certain places. My guns however I want to be realistic and I noticed in CS they are pretty detailed and they animate and also the game engine is low spec. I guess the CS team have it figured.

Thanx again...

STVOY


Pyre Light Studios (Under Construction)

I usually love Tom''s Hardware, but that hardware breakdown for the XBox was rediculous.

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It really depends of the game type and engine.
What matter is like said the total polycount on the scene and the engine.

For actual games like Q3 i''d go up to 1500polys, the ôriginal ingame models are lower in polycount but those are over a year old and totally outdated. 1500 polys and 1 or 2 512x512 skins run fine on actual systems.

For newer and coming FPS games 2000-5000 polys should be fine.
With a decent engine 2500-3000 polys is safe for a fast paced FPS game on the xbox still allowing very detailed level architecture and keeping 30fps. Same for the PC, you can go up to 5000+ but i''d be carefull with that.

If you''re doing a beat ''em up ala DOA for the xbox you can easily model at 5000-10000+ polys per char.