Wii Polycount?

veteehrri · Aug 2008

Hi guys, I would like to know if you have any idea about triangle limits on Nintendo Wii.
I'm trying find some information about and not having any good answer, just that Wii has 1/5 memory beside xbox360 and ps3 but nothing saying about geometry or with suggestions like, x number is good for character or x number is good to total triangles on screen or something like that. Don't know if this 1/5 system as base to model something is the right way to do that.
If anyone could help I'll really appreciate.
Tks.

fade1 · Aug 2008

as always hard to generalize, as it depends on what you do with the vertices. but usually trinagles are not the limiting issue for the wii. if you consider the lower res of the wii you can model everything really smooth and the blocky look of many games is just a matter of bad design or a bottlneck somewhere else in the engine. nevertheless the wii can't push that much more then the last gen consoles(gc, ps2, xbox). still this is no excuse for bad graphics, see super mario(i'd say around 4k vertices)...

veteehrri · Aug 2008

hi fade1, tks for the infos, totally agree about the bad design point, i'll search more about in this consoles you've told, and yeah mario galaxy is awesome!

Farfarer · Aug 2008

I believe Twighlight Princess Link was about 6900 tris, if that's any use. But is textured with tons of little textures rather than one big one.

A lot of the TP meshes are floating around online, shouldn't be too hard to find with a google search to look at.

kio · Aug 2008

wii can push a decent amount of static polygons. limited memory is more of a problem - like mininininini texture sizes... so it really depends on what you plan to do with it. just dont try to do a next gen realism thing, that will be a pain in the ass.
and dont forget that wii only supports pal/ntsc resolutions so no need to care for HD - helps a ton

PolyHertz · Aug 2008

kio wrote: »

wii only supports pal/ntsc resolutions so no need to care for HD - helps a ton

True (no ATSC for Wii), but don't forget to consider the basics while texturing either, such as how big the model will be on screen and what parts will be most visible.

I used to have a site bookmarked that listed the general texture resolutions and geometry count used for elements in many 'next-gen' and Wii titles. Maybe can find it again...

EarthQuake · Aug 2008

Thats not really true, there are a few specific resolutions standards that fit the specs of pal/ntsc, all of them being quite a bit lower than HD formats.

http://www.strata.com/support/3dmanual/ch13/ch13_7.html

bugo · Aug 2008

hey man, from 2 projects i´ve participated, characters can range between 1000 to 2500 tris, it depends on which game you would do. I´m not sure how many in a screen tho.

Chunkey · Aug 2008

To be honest mate, best thing to do is aim a bit above what you think is right, if it doesn't work, optimise till it does.

I know it seems more of a ball ache but it means that you can really push what's on screen then and if the coders find a means of pushing more geometry/higher res textures, you've got the assets there ready for it.

Also look at means of using the smaller textures, and for the smallest ones, look at indexing the palletes so they have a tiny foot print- sometimes even with compressed textures, it can work better with fewer colours or at least a clean texture that reuses tiles. I read up that the NNS TGA format on the DS compresses better when you start reusing patterns and gradients

I'd be interested to see what you come up with, gonna be aiming to do a portfolio that features DS/PSP/Wii spec graphics, always good to see how someone else approaches the art side of things

East · Aug 2008

In our latest Wii project I believe we were aiming to have a maximum of 60,000 triangles rendered on the screen at the same time. Tricount was rarely a problem for what we were doing, the Wii handled most meshes we threw at it, within reason.

Emil Mujanovic · Aug 2008

We did a bunch of Wii stress testing over a year ago just to see what we could do with it and we were pleasantly surprised actually. As kio mentioned, static polygons are a breeze for the Wii it seems, we managed to get 300,000tris rendered with 25 unique 512x512 textures without any real significant hit to render times (there was of course a noticable decrease, it was still above 30fps). We started with 50,000tris and worked our way up to find a breaking point, though I don't think we went much further than 300,000tris. This was of course without any particle effects, dynamic mesh, post-process effects and any code.
The memory is the biggest issue with the Wii, as it seems to push polies fairly well. So having lower res textures are going to be where you will have to make the ultimate sacrifice.
In the end, I think we settled on something like 50,000 - 75,000 on screen tris.

-caseyjones

thomasp · Aug 2008

isn't wii more like an overclocked gamecube? safe to say you should be checking out specs of gc assets that are relevant to what you intend to do - and then scale up very carefully from there.

if you happen to have access to nintendo's wii dev documentation, you will find some hints in there as to how wii compares to the gamecube in terms of performance. i do remember reading about it in there. it's all covered under NDA's for me, unfortunately.

veteehrri · Aug 2008

Tks a lot for all replies, really nice have this feedback, just opened my mind to figure out how the things could be, the project we'll work on have a lot of urban environment and 3rd person view like gta or no more heros more or less, but nothing similar.
Thank you guys.

Daaark · Aug 2008

Worrying about raw polygon counts is a thing of the past as long as it's kept realistic. The real bottlenecks on the modern machines are state changes, fillrate, shaders, etc. Also, some of the numbers up at the top of the thread are very low. I play PS2 games that have up to 7 people on screen at once with ~10k polygons each. The Gamecube can do even more. The more you reduce your state changes, and optimize the rendering, the more triangles you can get away with.

A lot of times you see Wii with lower end graphics because the art assets are shared with the PS2 port. The Wii can do better, but it's a 'kill 2 birds with one stone / lowest common denominator' thing.

Wii Polycount?

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