From a hardware and developer point of view the PS4 is very attractive compared of what the XB1 provides so far, but I fear, that the lowest common denominator will be choosen and that will make the games most likely look the same on both plattforms, much like the current gen games, considering that the hardware is very…
We are nearing that point already, with basically 8 gigs of vram on the PS4, I don't see artists really wishing they had more tris to work with. Characters in Killzone Shadow Fall will have 40,000 polys. It's possible now with tessellation to have enviroments with almost a triangle per pixel,…
The count of tris is not as important as it was 10 years back. Occlusion culling will be done on a very crude level of detail (e.g. a whole characters). The most basic and efficient culling approaches are still zbuffer (early z-buffer hardware + z-pre pass) and backface culling. Keeping this in mind and that pixel shaders…
On PC it is not so typical to cull on face level. Backface culling is basically a hardware feature, but frustum/occlusion culling not, you have to code your own algorithms leveraging GPU/CPU to do that. The static geometry of say good old quake/halflife levels indeed are culled on face level by CPU, prior sending to GPU,…