How many plys is too many?

[dede_frost]

Hi, I've been modeling some new sabers lately, and the poly count was gettin pretty extreme on some, like from 1500 to 2000. I was wondering if that many will cause performance/speed loss on my PC... If it depends on my specs, I have 6800GS paired up with a P4 3.0ghz and 1gb ram. But is this an overall good number of polys? (I'm guessing no, since I saw that most sabers have from 400 to 500...)

[T7nowhere]

Your system wouldn't have any problems with high poly models.

 

Most of Bioware's weapon models are under 200 tri's(triangles), the heads are around 1500, the body mesh's are around 3000 and the Area modules are anywhere from 10,000-60,000 tri's.

 

Most of my models are under 1000 tri's, though I have let a few go over 2000. If you think about it, it's not really necessary for any weapon models to go over 500 tri's since its rare that you get to see them up close, but were modders not game developers so we have the luxury of not worrying to much about poly counts.

 

The thing that you do have to consider though is that when you have many of these higher poly models in the same scene during game play it will affect game performance.

 

Though I have played through several times with my party all weilding Models I have made and I didn't notice any real fps loss, but you can be assured that if all the npc's in the game were also wielding "high poly" models then it would effect how the game runs.

 

It's not just poly count that you have to consider though, there is also the matter of high res textures. The higher res you go the more memory it will require to play the game.

 

To answer your question simply if you only have a couple 2000 poly models in your game you won't even notice it.