Sorry your browser is not supported!

Ok, I'm curious about several things. First off..

1. How many ways are there to deal with high polycounts on screen?
Fog? Sync rates?

2. At what number does a polycount become "too high"?
For a character...envirnoment...etc..ect..

3. Is 512x512 the max texture limit?

Anybody? This is a newbie question ...COME ON!

its all dependant on the machine u test it on.
using a distance function to eliminate many collision checks.
creating a timing method for all commands used in multiplayer.
A combination of issues to improve speed creates the final result.
The video card and machine throughput dictates how well it performs.
Test your game on the slowest machine u have to get a feel for its playability, compare this to your fastest machine.
IF u dont have a skipping timing method then one machine may run faster than the other.

It helps to have access or a copy of most of the common video cards to see a good range of results to determine what makes it slow or fast on any machine.

its not a newbi question infact its a considerably hard question with many aspects to cover.

What about question 3?

And thanks for the respones Indi. I'm been thinking how far I can take my character polycounts, and I've been thinking about ways to not use a poly envirnoment...like maybe use a prerendered image or something of the same scene. I don't know at the moment. I'm just fishing for answers.


Thanks again.

once again its video card dependant.

some older cards have a max of 256 texture sizes where others can tolerate 512 as a maximum

for the sync rate, 30-40fps for slow computers, 40-60 for medium speed computers and 60 and over for fast. So for optimal (in my opinion) is probably 30fps.

Brent, hy don't you post your system specs, then those with a similar system can tell you what they've found

Good idea Danmatsuma!

120 GBs of HD.
768 DDR RAM
1.1gig ATHLON XP
Geforce4 64mb.


I'm thinking thats all that relates to DBpro. I've still got 2 rams slots left, and I need a faster processer . But anyway thats my specs. Can the human eye detect anything over 30?


Thanks for the replies! This newbie thanks you!

Oh yeah DirectX 8.1...I believe...

Yes, the human eye will detect framerates over 30, but more importantly is how fast your screen refreshes when an object is very near to the camera.

NTSC video systems run at 30fps, but a video picture is pre encoded, precalculated if you will. Also the video system uses fields, so the screen is actually redrawn twice each frame, once for the odd lines, and once for the even. That's just to compensate for the phosphors in the screen losing their charge over time - I digress!

The reason you need as high a frame rate as possible for games are myriad, but here are some:

*Unlike a film or video picture, the user interacts with the image, giving them a kind of feedback loop which makes them far more sensitive to the refresh rate than a passive viewer.

*A computer screen does not interlace, as described above (fields).
*Movements of game entities are calculated in realtime, and so if you don't refresh the screen often enough, you may see an object move from one place to another by too large a distance to ensure a continuing suspension of disbelief, and at least in a fps, this is paramount, to create a sense of immersion. The most breathtaking graphics in the world will be useless in a fps if they refresh at something less than the rate it takes to allow this suspension of disbelief, look at something like wolfenstein3d(the original), the graphics are blocky and crude by todays standards, but it's still an enjoyable game because the feeling of movement in the game is clever enough to create a suspension of disbelief.

Now, your system has I think quite a lot more ram than the average pc games player has available. The graphics card spec I can't really tell because there are so many breeds of geforce4. Also, it's really going to depend on the kind of game you're writing, if you're making a superduper tetris type thing you could get away with perhaps 100000 polys without hurting the feel of the game at all, but in a fps you'd want to be a lot more careful.

My standard advice on this subject is to make your meshes and textures as small(low poly, low pixel) as possible whilst still retaining the effect you want to present. This way, no matter what sort of game you're making, if you can't get the frame rates you want, you weren't ever going to be able to!

Read that carefully, because what I mean is that if you do everything right and it still runs too slowly then the idea will have to change, perhaps not much, maybe you can't have that horde of 400 poly bees attacking, maybe you should make them out of textured plains etc, and running just one or two 400 poly ones close to the camera to highten the effect...

Unfortunately there's no real formula for polys/textures/code/hardware that can accurately tell you how fast a game you haven't written yet will run.
But I can tell you that my retro entry was written in db1.13/enhanced, and at any one time there are up to 10,000 polys on screen.

That runs fine at 50fps on my system, which is:

Athlon 1800xp
256ddr ram
Geforce2mx400

To add to this question...

What about the matrix? Do you include this in your poly count? And if so, does anyone have any advice on optimising it? In my current project, the floor is actually very important (it's the road) and needs to look as realistic as possible.

If I can optimise the matrix, it will allow me to increase the quality and number of features elsewhere.

Yes, you must of course include every 3d object in your scene/world polycount

As far as your road goes, if you look at many 3dracing games, the ground in an F1 type game will sometimes be as simple as be a textured plain, with a track drawn on it, whereas a rally type game will be hilly, and needs to be made of more poly's to show that. Most of the detail in either case comes from the texture, but in the case of the rally type game you can't fake it with a texture, for the actual geometry needs to rise and fall to create the illusion of driving around a rough terrain.
If you intend to use darklight shadows though, you'll need to divide even a purely flat surface up into as many faces as you can get away with, flat or not, if you want detail in the shadows, also there is I think a limitation on the size of a texture tile for a matrix tile in db1.13 and you should take that into account.

Remember also that a polygon is two triangles(faces) which share an edge.