I wanted to add a very large and detailed ship to my game, yet it is around two million polygons… There may be up to three or four of these ships at a time in the ocean, adding up to almost 8 million polygons… This is a PC game, and I am curious if this will even be runnable on a modern gaming computer. I dont want to spend time and money adding it if it is just going to crash the game.
It can be run at modern PC, but as suggestion would seperate the detailed ship into several part and use LOD system to reduce the polycount in far distance
Oh true, ya LOD will probably be quite necessary. Thanks for the info!
If a polygon doesn’t add to the visual identity of the object then it should not be there.
Of course characters you have to take into consideration animations, additional polys for deformations and etc, but still the same applies at some level.
Also, the more polys you have the longer loading times you give players to wait for…
And they always hate long loading screens, people and short attention spans these days.
GPUs render an image in 2x2 pixel grids. If there’s a lot of tris smaller than that 2x2 grid, it’ll have extra performance overhead. You will want to use LODs to lower the polycount of space ships as they get further away.
Read GPU Performance for Game Artists | FragmentBuffer
A game having 2-4 million tris on screen at once is pretty normal for a AAA game, that number can vary a lot.
Generally speaking, 8 million polygons is doable. I mean, the PS4 handled 11 million polygons on the screen at once in Infamous: Second Son and that was a launch title (I think). Therefore, yes, a modern gaming PC should handle this fine. However the difference being that I’m assuming you’re a one-man band and those that made Infamous: Second Son certainly were not. With LODs and proper optimization, this is easily doable.
Here’s the sticky part: other than polygons, what ELSE is going on on-screen? Polygons are rarely an actual concern these days. It’s the effects and other stuff going on that really muddies up the performance of a game.