How many polys can a grahpic card show?

General Discussion
1

Hey everyone, I know not all GPUs are the same, but how many can a “low” end GPU draw? Around the GForce 8800 ones I’m talking about. Atm, one of my towns are at 30k, but I want to keep adding more till it’s about 60k; is that to many or is that low? Cus I want to make the area look nice and cool.

For example, I’m using a 2d card trick to make grass look 3d, and I was going to do the same with the trees, but using the 2d card trick with trees looks really bad, so I want to add “real” tree models in instead, but they seem to want to take about 2-5k per tree.

2

You don’t have to worry about that. Most GPU’s can handle millions of triangles without breaking a sweat. Usually the bottleneck is in other things, such as the amount of meshes in your scene.

See this page for more info:
panda3d.org/manual/index.php/P … nce_Tuning

3

Depending on the distance from the camera you should replace trees with low poly version of them (decimated), or even better, replace the tree with a billboard (sprite). Even games on xbox360 and ps3 do that:
youtube.com/watch?v=EmHE5WUj … re=related
(skip to the middle).
However do the swapping smoothly. I havent done this myself so im just acting smart.

4

If you want some number:

The number of poly is not more important than the other parameter: size of texture, shader type, scene graph,…

We can’t really tell you a number of polygon limit that you must not exceed.

But At the same time, Don’t waste polygon if there is a better solution.

5

if you pack all triangles in one big bunch of geometry. your gpu can handle literally millions of them.
if you pack each triangle into a single geom… performance will be crawling slow even for a single tree with only 5k tris.

there are a few rules which are renerally true for all gpu’s

use as few triangles as possible as you can, but as much as neccessary to let your scene look good. LOD-ing helps a lot. billboards with normal-maps are great,too.

2nd rule would be. keep the number of individual geoms low. try to keep it below 200 onscreen. use flattenstrong() on static geometry to group them into bigger geoms. keeping the number low is good. going too low is bad, cause it breaks culling. you sorta have to balance it out. pstats will help a lot with finding a good compromise.

6

Thanks guys. I feel better knowing that I can still add a lot more for little loss. (Here I was worrying about 30k was a lot, lol).

Atm, anaylze says it’s at 65 Geoms using flattenstrong() on the static models, and the links say to keep it below 200-300 on screen, so I should be good for what I have and what I can add.

I was also building a LOD system; by system, I mean taking some models, like the grass and trees, and build the billboards as the player got to far away. Kknowing this makes me feel like I haven’t wasted my time either.

Wow, 1.2M? Thats alot o.o;

Just so I understand right, it’s not really the polygons, but amount that is needed to be drawn? Aka textures? Sorry, not really sure what a meshes really is. I always took at as the vertexts data, but I could be wrong.