I was wondering if I could get a clear explanation of how game engine's effect polycount. What's to say I can't take Unreal 2003 and plop a 15k GOW character model into it? What is it that caps the polycount on these older engines? Speed? Overhead? Can't manage the data effectively? Obviously C++ is faster than BASIC, so I…
A lot of it varies per engine and how the model data format is handled/implemented. UT2k3 doesn't seem to have a restrictive upper limit if it does have a limit at all. There have been character with 15000k plus tris created by players that run just fine in the engine. Old torque had coded limits of no more than 10000…
I think the issue of polycount is far less important that texture resolution, shaders, draw calls, ect Polycount is one of the simplest things a game engine has to do. It's all just basic math so if your computer is fast enough to handle all the points then its going to render fine. There are limits in game engines that…
Jocose's right, polycount doesn't seem to be as crucial as texture budgets, fill rate (shader complexity), draw calls/batch calls, and etc. polycount does still come into affect though--having over 32,000 verts can sometimes be a problem (I think it has something to do with storing the verts in a 16bit versus 8 bit). Older…
Thanks for the responses everyone. Very good info :) I knew it had to do with a combination of these things, but when someone asked me the question of "How many poly's can such and such engine handle" I wasn't able to articulate why he was asking the wrong question. Thanks. Haha, sorry, Poly count* :poly121: