Amounts of polys

I am calculating and designing my new project here and am wondering if you guys have any approximate number of polygons you prefer not to go above.

I will make a game that doesn't require much power more than drawing a lot of lowpoly entities on the screen.

The scene will probablyhave around 10000 polygons at most on screen. Is that to big of a number for B3D or could I boost it even more?

What do you think? Do you have a personal limit you work with?

i say 50.000

It depends who your target audience is and how good their PC is likely to be.

I will try to make my first puzzle game but it will be in 3d so it will be a lot of small cubes.

AJirenius,

Its more a matter of surface count - thats what will kill it more quickly than number of poygons.

IPete2.

ah a puzzle game. (i was thinking about an fps game)

thats why people use single surface particle systems.

for a puzzle game, you dont have to bash your head. if you take a cube or a simple quad, its ok. but be careful with the textures ;)

remember: textures in the vram will be scaled up to 16,32,64,128.... so it will be a loss of quality, speed and vram to make them 257x257 (for example).

10 000 polys should be piece of cake for renderer...but as before, I would suggest to take care about number of used textures as well as their size rather than number of polys...anyway 10K is really something you shouldnt worry about..

yeah, dont worry about the polys. worry about the number of surfaces/textures.
in fact, you dont have to worry about anything.

Sounds good. I'm relaxed and not worried then :D

There are more things to consider. Yes, number of polies and surfaces should be well balanced. 10 thousand polies shared by a few dozen surfaces may work well.

One thing you should ask first is: will there be special effects, such as Gloom, Depth of field, shadows etc? Basicly this means additional renders, so you may divide the polycount in your calculation right here.

Additionally there's the number of alpha levels a card can render in one step. Usually the cheaper hardware cannot handle more than 4 levels these days. So using a high number of screen covering alpha stuff will slow things down extremly.

I'd say use about 20'000 tris, 10'000 if you add gloom, 5'000 if you plan to use gloom (or so) and stencil shadows.