Next gen poly count

steveman 2007-03-11 04:47:35 UTC #1

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could tell me a good polycount for a detailed next gen game character. I was thinking about a character in the same style of Gears of War. Anyone got an estimate or what the number could be?

sumpm1 2007-03-11 05:59:47 UTC #2

10K - 15K polygons.

Kanga 2007-03-11 06:56:32 UTC #3

Thats pretty impressive!

heavyness 2007-03-11 08:50:34 UTC #4

here are some links i’ve collected…

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/character_creation2.jpg
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml

and i will be adding a new thread were people can contribute to the on going polygon limit size increase so we can keep cgtalk up-to-date. but for now, here are some other links…

Valuable Game Art Threads/How To/Guidelines…
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=39&t=459427

UGAC talk with some polygon limit mixed in…
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=127&t=445345&page=1&pp=15

CGmonkey 2007-03-11 10:59:36 UTC #5

When is next-gen considered current gen? Because, GoW my friend, is current gen

heavyness 2007-03-11 11:59:05 UTC #6

i would consider “next gen poly count” any game that isn’t out yet. with all the little tricks and new types of geometry/mapping work-a-rounds, a game that comes out 1 year later then another on the same system is considered next gen.

mech7 2007-03-11 12:24:40 UTC #7

how much poly’s can a next gen system (for example ps3) have on screen at the same time?

CGmonkey 2007-03-11 12:33:46 UTC #8

that is hugely dependant on what kind of engine the ps3 are running… but maximum… perhaps… 1 million?

Wouldn’t next-gen be considered what’s on the horizon? Like, when Id presents its new engine?

MLongfield 2007-03-11 12:41:05 UTC #9

I remember when people used polygons to judge a systems power. PS3, 360 and PC can push much more than that. I think I remember reading long ago that Dreamcast could push about 3 million (not sure if this is with all effects turned on). The character models in Fight Night round 3 have very high poly counts.

ienrdna 2007-03-11 12:44:34 UTC #10

were those hi-rez models really modeled 3dsmax? not ZBrush?

CGmonkey 2007-03-11 12:53:13 UTC #11

there is a difference between viewable polygons and viewed polygons.

MLongfield 2007-03-11 12:59:28 UTC #12

I know. A company may say their console can push 20 million polygons, but when all effects, textures, lighting, A.I, sound etc. are turned on, it would’nt be able to push that many. They just give you the number of how many ‘raw’ polygons it can do.

phudgey 2007-03-11 13:04:27 UTC #13

Yawn… at some point these threads become pointless… please do a search

Per-Anders 2007-03-11 13:20:01 UTC #14

The polygons and the viewable/viewed polygons isn’t so relevant, any number can push a virtually infinite number of polygons, the very important and apparently forgotten factor was the time period this was measured over, and back when they were counting polygons it was per second, that means that in one second the dreamcast could draw 3 million polygons, i.e. you would have a frame rate of ~1fps for that many polygons, not 3 miliion polygons in realtime, so in fact to get to realtime which for a console game is really a minimum of ~30fps you’re really looking at in an ideal situation of 100 000 polygons on screen on that old system.

That by the way is pure hardware drawing, i.e. a model fully loaded into memory not being shifted, nothing moving (apart from the camera maybe), no game engine, no character etc, so adding that lot in would reduce things quite a bit. No idea what the current gen is capable of though, probably a million or more in realtime and ideal scenario, in realworld though probably far less than that.

ambient-whisper 2007-03-11 14:47:40 UTC #15

it all depends on the game, and what the characters role will be in game. recently Ive done some stuff for a next gen game and the polycount limit was under 6000.

considering how much detail a model can contain within normal maps, characters can get away having a lot less geometric detail than usual.

look at this model by kolby jukes.
http://www.kolbyjukes.com/subpages/hulk.html

that character is less than 7000 triangles. and if he didnt have to be so expressive in the face, he could have made it much less than that.

mech7 2007-03-12 07:29:33 UTC #16

Yeah that one does look amazing… only sometimes when there is heavy use of normal maps you can see the flat outlines which sometimes looks a bit funny, this model only has it minimal for example head / shoulder looks a bit flat, bit insane detail on the body

aglick 2007-03-12 08:11:14 UTC #17

Seems like folks are starting to use more specvic language when it comes to realtime 3D peformance.

For instace, a polgon can obviously have either 3 or 4 sides. Many specs now list the number of “triangles” per second…

Also, alot of the time, lightmaps and textures are baked-in to help preserve realtime mapping and dynamic lighting performance. Again, it helps to be specific when it comes to talking about raw performance.

For instance, the Xenos (the ATI-developed GPU in the XBOX 360) is reporteldy capable of 500 million POLYGON TRIANGLES/SEC (1.5 Billion vertices). As impressive as that sounds, I belive those are the numbers for unlit, unshaded geometry…raw triangle setup.

Transformed, shaded and lit for gameplay, I’ll bet the “poly-per-second” (or tri-per-sec) count is much much lower…depending on which engine and the scene details…

Anybody got any hard data on that?

Adam
BOXX labs

aglick 2007-03-12 08:26:11 UTC #18

whoopsy…()

P_T 2007-03-12 09:32:20 UTC #20

My question is, how do you find out what the optimal poly budget is when you’re creating a game and how do you decide on sharing that budget between characters and environment/props, ie. how much the environment/props/characters should get? Trial and error doesn’t seem to be very efficient.