Poly count comparison of last gen consoles vs. current gen consoles

kevingamerartist

Hi all,
So I haven't posted a new thread for a couple of months, but here it is. Anyways I have a question about the poly count for objects. So I'm an aspiring Junior Environment Artist, and my question is how much has the poly count risen to given with the current gen consoles compared to the last gen consoles? I'm pretty sure I have either heard people talk about this, or I have read about it, but I wasn't too sure whether the current gen consoles increased the polygon count.

I just wanted to make sure that while I'm creating objects I'm not going too low or too high while creating them. I'm transitioning over from UDK, the free version of Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4.

Any feedback on this is greatly appreciated. Thank you

kevingamerartist

I forgot to add that if the poly count has indeed increased, how much has it increased by?

Example of what I'm asking is an object being able to be 500 triangles before, but now it can be like 700 triangles or more now in Unreal Engine 4. I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I'm just curious.

Obscura

Good question! There are many threads floating around here about this, as you mentioned. Still, the important questions are which platform are you asking about, how close you can get to the given object, etc. But I would say, if we are talking about PCs or next gen consoles, then tricount isn't an issue, actually it almost worth more to use use more polies then normals and expensive shaders and textures. To give an idea , lets say we are talking about a car asset, which would have been around 15-25k triangles in the previous generations, and now this number can be around even 100k, but everything depends on how things are done and how you optimized everything, and based on the first questions! So if its really far from the camera then it doesnt worth do pump the many polies into it, but if its something like an NPCs car then it can worth. The short answer to your question is, check JordanN's thread and you'll get the basic answers.

BagelHero

There's no hard and fast rule, like, "Oh, yeah, you can use 20% more polys now".
It's not something that's particularly easy to measure, and it's completely different per object, with factors like if it will ever be seen close up, if it's only every seen as part of a large exansive and lived in environment and so many other things.

I'd suggest not getting hung up on stuff like this, and just focus on constructing objects/environments smartly. Just because you could use 700 tris for an object doesn't mean you need to, if you could get it done with 300-500. Only use loops where you need them, don't put a heap of polys in areas that don't affect the silhouette, don't bevel entire objects just because, etc.

With more power the upper limit of potential polycount of course goes up, but it's kind of hard to guess what that upper limit will be for you because it depends heavily on other things like type of game, platforms, how complex the shaders will be, how high rez the textures will be... it's very much dependent on the project.

There's been some The Order: 1886 environment dumps recently, that game is gorgeous and they have some shots of their environment and vista wires. I'd go check those out to see where poly's are being spent currently-- there's also other breakdowns or at least vague numbers floating around for a lot of different previous gen/current gen games if you look in the right places (GDC talks and slides are a good place to start looking).

Just don't start spending 1000k tris on a crate. I'm a character guy though, so maybe there is some way to measure it, and I'm just not in the know.

kevingamerartist

Obscura: Do you have a link to JordanN's thread, or do you know where I would find this thread at?

Moosebish

If you are still looking for a job and putting together a portfolio, I'd focus more on making beautiful art before thinking about the technical aspects of it.

When looking at other people's portfolios. Its more glaring to me that people have wasted polygons, rather than used too many. "Too many" is very subjective. But an edge loop that didn't get deleted is more annoying.

If your portfolio is full of gorgeous work that shows that you really have an eye for making quality stuff, then you'll land a gig. If your work is sub-par, its not going to matter how optimized you made it. There are no rules that you have to show UV layouts or polycounts for any of your work. If a potential employer wants to see them, they'll ask.

Your job, as an artist, is to create attention grabbing/impressive work with the tools you have. The technical aspects will be established on a case by case basis for whatever project you're working on.

All that being said, it never hurts to tailor your portfolio to the companies you really wanted to work at. If you want to work on mobile games, then pre-rendered or low poly assets should be displayed on your portfolio. But if you want to work on AAA games, then make sure you show that you have no problem with the high-low poly workflow and PBR textures.

Good luck on the never ending journey!