Poly Count for a Standalone game?

found this in the unity manual on their site:

Polygon Count

The number of polygons you should use depends on the quality you require and the platform you are targeting. For mobile devices, somewhere between 300 and 1500 polygons per mesh will give good results, whereas for desktop platforms the ideal range is about 1500 to 4000. You may need to reduce the polygon count per mesh if the game can have lots of characters onscreen at any given time. As an example, Half Life 2 used 2500-5000 triangles per character. Current AAA games running on the PS3 or Xbox 360 usually have characters with 5000-7000 triangles. Keep vertex count below 200K..3M per frame when targetting PCs, depending on the target GPU

You shouldn't really bother about poly count for PC games, unless you go totally insane and making next Crysis.

What you do in your shaders tends to matter a lot more than how many triangles you rasterize. The only actual way to know these is, like you said, to test it yourself.

It's just that today we had massive frame loss with a test build on a 2GB ram laptop, image effects seem to be another problem as well hah

Thanks guys, very useful info it made a difference on this project!

There's no simple answer because the poly counts depend on the graphics you're going for, the hardware, and things like how many textures you're using, their sizes, what the shaders are and the pixel coverage of each in the world, how efficient your state management is, what post effects you have, etc, etc.

In other words, you need someone experienced in graphics programming to do this. You're not going to get the answer on a forum.

Hey, im developing a 1st person game for the PC and i can't seem to find anything online that would really help me in figuring out where my poly counts should be.

• Engine: Unity.
• Platform: PC stand alone.
• Genre: Puzzle Adventure.

One of the core goals is to immerse the player into the atmosphere of the game, so graphics is a priority we're trying to keep.

While we were modeling props we thought are 300 polys really fine for a single door that would be multiplied over the environment?

or a 200 poly window? or if the House the player is going to play in is 5,200?

You did not make a typo ? Did you perhaps mean 300 thousands tris ? Wow, talk about a trip back to the past long gone...

A scene of 5,200 tris, is something that an nVidia TNT2 32 MB card can do. How can I know that number exactly ? Because over 10 yrs ago I had to create a series of 3D screensavers (C++/DirectX) that had to run - emphasis being on the word- fluently on an nVidia TNT 2. Do you have any idea how old that card is ? It was released in 1999. That's ~15 yrs ago !

Hell, even GF2 GTS, that was released mere 13 yrs ago, was giving me fluent framerate for scenes consisting of over 120,000 tris - though I gotta admit,that terrain renderer had some pretty neat optimizations - but still - scene of over 100k tris on GF2.

I can't talk about Unity's renderer performance, so you will have to test that one out, assuming you can even lay your hands on a properly ancient (& still working!) HW of sorts(not implying Unity'd run on TNT, but you get my point).

Now, I know very well it is very easy to write renderers that waste performance.

But to write a renderer that has a problem with a primitive scene of 5000 tris and a couple textures , even on a gfx card 5 yrs old, now that would be a truly icredible feat.

I don't remember the exact model of my gfx card that I have in my computer, it is GF 4XX-series, so it's best yrs are at least 3-4 yrs behind us.

But few days ago, when I was testing some hi-poly meshes, I got myself a scene consisting of over 4 million tris, yet I still got over 50 fps.

And that's with zero optimization - 200 Mil tris per second. I did not play with proper caching of indices, or proper vertex size or proper configuration of multiple vertex streams or anything. It was just a simple brute-force for a short test.

Who, in this day and age, spreads the rumors that a 300-poly mesh could possibly be a problem ? If someone has a phone that can't handle 5000 tris, he sure as hell ain't gonna play your game on it for a very simple reason - 'cause he ain't playing games on his phone at all...

Now, I'm just waiting for the first person to bring the integrated gfx "argument" to this discussion...

Hey, chillie vladR! you're on fire man:p

i meant to say an empty house that has 5,200 polys after props a scene will probably be around 50,000 + or -

thing is i could flood unity with a million polys and it'll barely lag, but at the second i add image effects (DOF) it gives out some major lag, so i'd have to cut. (i love image effects lol)

also i'll probably get most of my info wrong because frankly i'm 20, barely experienced and this is the first game im working on, but hey i adore people commenting on this post, i learn something almost every sentence.

Since you are using Unity, and do not have anyone on team who is well-versed with rendering techniques from their implementation standpoint, you just have to experiment with each effect to see what kind of performance implications it has.

Just try to do the benchmarking using the same scene and only disable one effect at a time to get at least remotely reasonable estimate of the costs of given effect.

Don't forget that 5 fps drop at 15 fps is much, much more severe than 5 fps drop at 60 fps (think about the frame-time length and you'll see what I mean).

Another thing worth noting is that adding polys to the scene which is heavy on postprocessing effects is going to have minimal effect on performance, especially at the border fps value as, say, 30 fps - since there is a set threshold of XX% vs YY%, where XX% of shader units are reserved for pixel shaders and YY% of shader units (on your gfx card) are reserved for vertex shaders.

Meaning, you are probably not using the vertex shaders units now - like - at all (the 5% load you're giving them right now does not even count), but you are totally abusing those poor pixel shader units (it is, after all, drop-dead easy to enable a checkbox in Unity)...

Also, there is a big performance difference in adding a single object with 100.000 tris and 1000 objects with 100 tris each. Not sure what kind of a batching Unity does, but it is worth noting.

(it is, after all, drop-dead easy to enable a checkbox in Unity)...

Yeah, most of unity kinda operates almost everything that way haha

thanks for the info means a lot!