What's a Million Polygons

[DCillusion]

I just started working on 3D art, and I have a fast system & video card, but my computer seems to top out at 1 million polygons in design programs.  Now I understand that in modeling cpu performance takes a hit, but I loaded an entire level of Unreal 2004, (which runs on my system fine at topped-out settings, into Lightwave, and it was just under a million polys.  What gives, my Card should run 353 polys per second, and Unreal looks better than any N64 game I've ever seen, (1-million polys per second specs).  What does all this mean?  How do people rate Poly levels?  All I know is, if games ACTUALLY ran a million polygons, they'd look a lot better.

[shbaz]

In a game you have a framerate, right? Usually a minimum of 30 frames per second if you have a good computer. Even though your Unreal level had a million polys, you don't see them all at once because that would bog down the computer. There are culling functions so that whatever isn't on the screen isn't rendered (like polys totally concealed by other objects and those not in the view of the camera). Depending on the engine and the scene, my computer can handle about 50 fps (as a modest figure). So lets say there are about 20,000 polys on my screen after culling. 20,000 polys x 50 fps = 1,000,000 polys per second.

Get it now?

It's also important to take into regard the CPU usage of sound effects/music mixing and large texture maps, but that's not often done.

[DCillusion]

Wow!  I had asked everyone I know, and gone to numerous message boards and no one could give me a straight answer.  I didn't come here for a while because my first game isn't finished.......

Thanks, I should've come here sooner.