Wondering About Poly Count Limits.

[Philthy]

I was just curious but would anyone know what the poly count limits are for the doom 3 engine? Im gonna start work on a level and I didnt know of any guidelines to go by or where to find them. Thanks

[Renzatic]

Average is usually about 65-75,000 tris per portal. You can go higher than that, but it's always good to keep the low end people in mind.

 

If you wanna know about max poly count in general though...well...as far as anyone knows there isn't one. As long as your comp can handle it Doom 3 can render it.

[Ishtvan]

Note when Renz says "per portal" he means that's the total number of poly's in a given area that is sectioned off by visportals. Visportals are a helpful tool that divides up the map so that the renderer renders the stuff within the player's portal area, but then doesn't try to render stuff that the player can't possibly see from that area.

[Fingernail]

However, scissoring saves on fill rate, so the dynamic effect of that can save you - ie. how many polys you can actually SEE onscreen. However, the extra ones are all being sent to the GPU, so it's still CPU power used up, they're just not being filled.

[OrbWeaver]

Average is usually about 65-75,000 tris per portal. You can go higher than that, but it's always good to keep the low end people in mind.

Does that take into account the fact that you may be rendering more than one visportal at once? If you have two adjacent portals with 75,000 tris each, you may be able to see 150,000 if you stand in the right position.

[Renzatic]

I'd say the best thing to do there would be to bottleneck 2 complicated areas and put another portaled zone between em.

 

Like instead of having 2 gigantic rooms with loads of cool architecture side by side have a small hallway connecting them together instead.

[Demigod]

The level load times is also effected here, more pollies = bigger collision + proc file. Make it too big and the level takes quite a while to load.

[OrbWeaver]

I'd say the best thing to do there would be to bottleneck 2 complicated areas and put another portaled zone between em.

 

Like instead of having 2 gigantic rooms with loads of cool architecture side by side have a small hallway connecting them together instead.

OK, that's what I thought. By "65k per portal" you meant "65k renderable at any one time", and it's up the the designer to make sure the visportals are set up correctly to effect this.

[Fingernail]

The loading time thing is inevitable really - you want big levels, expect big load times.