What is the polycount for "next-gen" consoles?
Hey,
I'm curious about how many polys the next-gen consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, and The Wii) are capable of handling. What's an average poly count for a character in a FPS for example? What about the maps/environment? I've been able to find a few estimates on the internet, but they seem to be all over the place.
Thanks for the info.
I'm curious about how many polys the next-gen consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, and The Wii) are capable of handling. What's an average poly count for a character in a FPS for example? What about the maps/environment? I've been able to find a few estimates on the internet, but they seem to be all over the place.
Thanks for the info.
Replies
It depends on a lot of things, are they streaming the levels in or loading it all at once? Are they using portals? Are they using simple vertex animation or are the models fully rigged? Most games are taking advantage of vertex buffers which means that in many cases the resolution of geometry they use is affected by the size of the screen buffer and the amount/resolution of the textures they are loading. Because of these memory and bandwidth limitations the consoles will not be able to reach their upper limit of raw triangle performance.
Most of the time, the limits game developers set on themselves are pretty arbitrary anyway. Someone on the team will dictate the limits before the game is even up and running with a to the best of their knowledge guesstimate. Assets are then built to these specifications and as the game becomes playable they start scaling back the specifications if it looks like resolution is going to be an issue. If the game is running well, they don't often start pushing the resolution to see how much geometry they can get away with. Often times the game is multiplatform and the geometry specification is dictated by the target platform which is not usually the best performing platform. For example, many developers will develop a game for the 360 and the PS3 simultaneously using the PS3 as their target. In some cases, even though both systems are pretty evenly matched in terms of performance, the 360 will be able to push quite a bit more geometry due to the amount of memory available. In these cases the developer will usually opt for higher res textures because it's much easier to do and gives you more bang for the buck than adding to the resolution of the geometry. In some cases they also start adding set dressing to the levels (more grass, more trees, more buildings, more, more, more). It's much easier to do something like this than actually tailor the models themseves to the platform.
Because someone gave a smartass answer, and others did not give exact numbers but rather the correct answer.
It depends on the game, the studio, how much of what is going to be on the screen and how important that object is.
r.
Also, if you read my post I asked for the number of polys a next-gen console could handle. I wanted to know about how many ploys you could have on the screen at any one time, again just a ballpark is fine. I realize this depends on the game engine and other factors, but there has to be some general area regardless of other factors. Are we talking 100K's or millions or hundreds of millions?
I'm also curious about the average polycount for current games. For example how many polys do you think the characters in gears of war are? 3000? 10,000? 50,000?
I recall reading somewhere that characters for unreal 2004 were around 3000 polygons each. Then I read somewhere else that the 360 could handle about 500 million poly's per second, which at 30 fps is around 17 million polys per second. If this is the case the character models could be WAY more poly dense than 3000 polys since there is never more than 16 or so characters on the screen at once, and even at 100,000 polygons for each character and 5 million for the environment that would be nowhere near 17 million.
There's a threshold somewhere in there that you pass where the verts your adding/moving around, do little to almost nothing when you look at it on a television screen from the game camera.
Could a game push 17 million polygons per frame on the XBox 360... I really want to say no way in hell. 17 million static polygons with one set of UV coords could potentially be several hundred megs of raw uncompressed data. That's just uv mapped triangles, no rigs weights, textures attributes or anything. Even if the graphics chip is really capable of 17 million traingles per frame the system has neither the memory nor the bandwidth to achieve it.
Just guessing, I'd think the Gears of War player models are in the 5-7K realm, and in general games are probably pushing in the 350-700K polygons per frame on the XBox 360.
Now serious man, i wouldn't go higher then 10000 tris for a main character. It might happen, but for being safe i would keep above that. But as all other said, it really depends on what we are talking aboout, on a fighting game where you have few more then 2 characters and a small scenario that would be higher, on a racing game the cars are also very higpoly... but i usually take FPS average specifications as a good mark.
Also keep in mind texture sizes too, i see comonly people doing a couple 2048 for each channel. Not really sure, but from what i heard ram memory on the Ps3 is the $hit.
It's all about doing the most detail with the least amount of resources.
If you can make a Gears of War model with 500 polys and it looks exactly the same (not that anyone could) guess who just put someone at Epic out of a job? The winner is you.
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Hawken's on the money
-caseyjones
I've noticed that for PC games, the "polygon limit" is a bit more flexible than for Console games. For example, the game Freedom Force suggests a poly limit of 2k polies for custom content player models, yet has figures with as many as 3.5 k tris as player models. Then again, for some bizarre reason all of their models are within the 2k limit if you count quads and not tris. Anyway, this game is almost six years old, so some people (who still model for the game) have made meshes with as many as 10k tris. Too bad it only accepts diffuse, glow, and reflectivity (not specular) maps...
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This has nothing to do with Concole vs PC. It's the same on both platforms. These limits aren't hard coded or enforced to the last polygon; they are just budgets developers use to balance look and perfromance with the available resources. In some case they'll allow a particular character to go over significantly or have another character stay under. The reason why you can now put a 10,000 polygon character into a 6 year old game is because the PC hardware has improved to a point to allow this. If someone out there is still playing that game using hardware that is 6 years old, the game is likely to not run with 10,000 polygon characters for them because the hardware likely won't have the resources to handle that many polygons. Take Quake; you could make plug-in player models in the 10's of thousands of polygons, and the game will scream along on a modern PC, but you try to run those same models on the Pentium 90 with 8 megs of RAM I played that game on when it was first released and you won't have much luck.
I just find it odd that the docs they sent out to us refer to the polycount as including quads in the polycount, not tris...
Hi Sam,
Thank you for writing us.
The technical specifications for the PLAYSTATION(R)3 computer entertainment system have been
released at a press conference in Los Angeles, California, in May of 2006. You can view the
specifications of the PLAYSTATION(R)3 system by clicking on the following link:
http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3/About/TechnicalSpecifications
==================================
PLAYSTATION(R)3 system SPECIFICATIONS
==================================
CPU: Cell Processor PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
--1 VMX vector unit per core
--512KB L2 cache
--7 x SPE @3.2GHz
--7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
--7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
--*1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
--Total floating point performance: 218 gigaflops
GPU RSX @ 550MHz
--1.8 TFLOPS floating point Performance
--Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
--Multi-way programmable parallel Floating point shader pipelines
SOUND
Sound Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-based processing)
MEMORY
256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz
256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz
SYSTEM BANDWIDTH
Main RAM -- 25.6GB/s
VRAM --22.4GB/s
RSX -- 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read)
SB -- 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)
SYSTEM FLOATING POINT PERFORMANCE:
2 teraflops
STORAGE
--HDD Detachable 2.5" HDD slot x 1 (20G or 60G)
--I/O--USB Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
--Memory Stickstandard/Duo, PRO x 1
--SD standard/mini x 1
--CompactFlash(Type I, II) x 1
COMMUNICATION
--Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2)
--Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g
--Bluetooth--Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)
CONTROLLER
--Bluetooth (up to 7)
--USB 2.0 (wired)
--Wi-Fi (PSP)
--Network (over IP)
AV OUTPUT
Screen size 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
HDMI out x 1
AV multi out x 1
Digital out (optical) x 1
DISC MEDIA *Read Only
CD
PlayStation CD-ROM
PlayStation2 CD-ROM
CD-DA
CD-DA (ROM)
CD-R
CD-RW
SACD Hybrid (CD layer)
SACD HD
DualDisc (audio side)
DualDisc (DVD side)
PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM
PLAYSTATION(R)3 DVD-ROM
DVD-ROM
DVD-R
DVD-RW
DVD+R
DVD+RW
Blu-ray Disc
PLAYSTATION(R)3 BD-ROM
BD-ROM
BD-R
BD-RE
Which leads me to beleive the answer to my original question (how many polys can the PS3 is rendering on screen) is...A shit ton.
-sammo1999
They are quoting the terraflop speed rating correctly. It's only durring FP operations on the GPU, not common operators. Just give it some time. I'm sure if you could show something like nvperfhud on a ps3 or equivilent you would see how many of those cell processors are sitting idle.
Think about it. The ps3 does'nt even break a sweat on unreal 3, and it's most likely still not an optimized for ps3 engine.
7 power pc cpu's at 3.2 ghz each blows away current mathmatical computing on a home system Jarrod. The reason you think it's slow is because nothing has been specifically optimized for the cell processor.
They are quoting the terraflop speed rating correctly. It's only durring FP operations on the GPU, not common operators. Just give it some time. I'm sure if you could show something like nvperfhud on a ps3 or equivilent you would see how many of those cell processors are sitting idle.
Think about it. The ps3 does'nt even break a sweat on unreal 3, and it's most likely still not an optimized for ps3 engine.
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yes, i admit the cell is powerful, from every other respect aside from the cell ps3 is not as powerful as the xbox 360 or available pc's.
although i've also heard that only 6 spe's are available for developers to use.
btw, i should mention that each spe is not the equilvilent of one power pc cpu. the spe's are in a sense half cpu's that mainly only deal with floating point operations, and all spe's lack branch prediction, only the ppe has branch prediction. so all in all, the cell is built more for gernal type computing. what it is being fed truly is what determines how fast it is, and for games it is about middle of the road powerful.
and keep in mind that when i say a pc and xbox 360 are more powerful, i am refering to how good they are at running games.
For Crackdown, cars were supposed to be under 10,000 polygons. For some cars, we didn't need that many, and looked great at 6,500-8,500. But then there were other more unique and complex vehicles such as the missile truck which ended up needing 15,000. Since you are likely to see multiple sedans and commuter cars at a time, it was very important to stay under budget for those types of vehicles specifically. But since you're not likely to see many missile trucks, it was OK to push the limit for those up a little.
Now take into account that in Crackdown, you could end up seeing dozens of cars at the same time, as well as buildings, props, weapons, explosion effects,a bunch of characters running around, and a big, open environment. In a racing game, you won't see as many animated characters, you won't see any weapons, and the race courses will restrict what you can see in the environment, and there won't be explosions. To make it simple, a racing game is more car-centric. Therefore polygon counts and detailing of the cars will by much more intensive, as that is what is more important to the game.
I believe Gears of War characters are 9000 polygons, give or take, with high res for normals/parallax maps in the 2 million range.
A nice Silhouette, a nice high resolution texture with no stretching, and some smooth animation, and you got me hooked.
I believe Gears of War characters are 9000 polygons, give or take, with high res for normals/parallax maps in the 2 million range.
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I think that's only for the biggest monsters, if anything. They don't say, but judging by the wireframes in the art book I wouldn't figure Marcus or the other Cog soldiers are over 5-7k.