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[PoulMarar]

How many polygons can HE handle without loosing fps? I mean enviromental objects and about 500-600 dynamic objects like players. What will be the best choice for high\mid\low level of details.

[HE-Cooper]

Good place to start:

http://wiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Controlling_Frame_Rate_%28FPS%29

[DragonFist]

Very hard question to answer.  There are a lot of variables as polygon counts aren't the only things to affect this.

This article should help address what I think you're trying to address:

http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Character_Design_and_Development

[PoulMarar]

Keeping Primitive Counts Under 100,000. ok now i can see poly count of environment. And what about dynamic obj such as players. Let's take 1000-1200 poly count of character. We are using basic development sycle - 3d sculpting - painting - retopo - finishing with uv maps (diffuse, normal, spec and alpha maps) - job done. All characters are consist of 50 bones.

720 000 characters poly count + 100 000 or 200 000 for environment = 820 000 or 920 000. less than million. We are not talking about fx effects. Most of engines can handle 6m of poly. Lets return to the start. How many polygons can HE handle without loosing fps? 

[JoshHalls]

Poly/draw count is abstract and based on the minimum specs of your game.  Have you determined your audience and what kind of hardware you are going to expect?  Integrated video, dedicated video?  Low end cards, middle end cards? 

MMOs tend to have a rather unpredictable amount of objects in a scene and so it is typically best to aim fairly low if you are expecting a lot of people to show up in a scene.  Even in WoW you typically do not see more than 20-50 objects at one time in view and with complex animation and dynamic parts adding extra draw calls there is a very good reason for this.  If you turn on dynamic shadows it only starts to multiply from there.

[Stadi_Thompson]

Keeping Primitive Counts Under 100,000. ok now i can see poly count of environment. And what about dynamic obj such as players. Let's take 1000-1200 poly count of character. We are using basic development sycle - 3d sculpting - painting - retopo - finishing with uv maps (diffuse, normal, spec and alpha maps) - job done. All characters are consist of 50 bones.

720 000 characters poly count + 100 000 or 200 000 for environment = 820 000 or 920 000. less than million. We are not talking about fx effects. Most of engines can handle 6m of poly. Lets return to the start. How many polygons can HE handle without loosing fps?  

It is really irrelevant to how many polys the engine can handle. If you are using DirectX as a renderer you follow the rule of thumb that all game developers follow which is "As low as you can go". It is up to you how detailed your characters are as well as your world. It is always good to have a pretty game, but understand you can achieve that with a low poly count by taking advantage of baking normal maps by modeling with programs like Zbrush and Mudbox. The characters in Gears of Wars are near 10k -15k polys, if you are exceeding that for an mmo per character your may need to find a way to optimize your characters etc. Here is an idea of what some games are using polycount wise (it varies greatly per genre of game):

Gears of War, Xbox 360, 2006
Wretch - 10,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Boomer - 11,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Marcus - 15,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps

GTA San Andreas, PS2, 2004
Characters - 2,000 polygons with 1 256×256 8bit texture
NPCs - 1,200 polygons with 1 256×128 8bit texture

Halflife 2, PC, 2004
Alyx Vance - 8323 polygons
Barney - 5922 polygons
Combine Soldier - 4682 polygons
Classic Headcrab - 1690 polygons
SMG - 2854 polygons (with arms)
Pistol - 2268 polygons (with arms)

Halo, Xbox, 2001
Masterchief - 2,000 polygons

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Gamecube, 2005 (Small mistake here, it's not on GC but PS2)
Snake - 4,000 polygons

Resident Evil 4, Gamecube, 2005
Leon - 10,000 polygons

Jak & Daxter, PS2, 2001
Jak - 4000 polygons

Jak II, PS2, 2003
Jak - 10,000 polygons*

Lost planet, X360/PC, 2007
Wayne - 12392 polygons (but finally 17765 polygons for compatibility with motion blur effect)
VS robot - 30-40K polygons
Background - ~500K polygons
Peak number of polygons per frame - ~ 3 million**

Dead Rising, X360, 2006
Peak number of polygons per frame - ~ 4 million**

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, GC, 2002
Link - 2800 polygons

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, GC/Wii, 2006
Link - 6900 polygons

Super Mario Sunshine, GC, 2002
Mario - 1500 polygons
Levels - ~ 60k polygons

Dead or Alive series, Xbox, 2001-2004
Character - ~10k

Vitua Fighter 5, Arcade/PS3/X360, 2006
Character - ~40k with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Background - 100K - 300K polygons

Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, PC, 2002
Character - 4096 polygons

Project Gotham Racing 3, X360, 2005
Cars - 80K-100K polygons (interior + exterior), damages add between 10K and 20K more polygons per car

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, PS3, 2007
Cars - 200K polygons (probably interior + exterior)

Midnight Club, Xbox360/PS3, 2007
Cars - 100K polygons

Gran Turismo 3, PS2, 2001
Cars - ~2K-4K polygons

Gran Turismo 4, PS2, 2004
Cars - ~2k-5K polygons

Also if you must know the number, make a sphere that is 62k triangles, and make multiple instances of it till you fell it is sluggish for you min requirements.

[HE-Cooper]

No wonder my machines always chugged on HL2! 1600 polys for a headcrab! That's crazytown. 

[Rissa2002]

http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/General_Counts_and_Budgets

this one may help ya better i think for what ya wanting to figure. fyi tip on the bottom of every wiki is a catagory this one is Art and clicking it gives a much better over all listing of all Art related wiki's for HE

[JoshHalls]

In general, the poly/draw count seems to be in place with most forward renderers that I have seen.  I wouldn't push it over 500-1m or 1000 draws on most middle end cards.  If you are targetting a casual crowd, that number is going to be MUCH lower because you have to deal with Intel Integrated junk.  These numbers are all subjective to what you would consider the bare minimum and what kind of framerate you accept as playable at the very low end.

Also, characters (or anything moving via animation) is going to eat up CPU vs a static building with more prims and draws and you start adding in FX and particles there is more going on there as well, so it really is about identifying what you find acceptable and establishing a baseline and moving on from there.

[Sanctus]

I know this is a old thread but I just wanted to leave my 2 cents for people who might be interested in this in the future:

Always try to predict the hardware that will exist when releasing a game.
If you start now and the game will only be released after 2 years the average video card performance will be quite increased.
For instance, I'm working on a HD 6990 which is about the best(speed-wise) card there is at the moment. If I can reach 60 fps with this I really don't have to worry that the next gen but lower end cards will handle it well.
And another thing is that the next generation will be on 28nm which will give us a very big performance gain.

Thanks

[nekman]

After reading the wiki topic http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Controlling_Frame_Rate decided to view your statistics. Adding to the card 10 and 15 models of trees, got the number of primitives of order 1 million - 2 million
The number of polygons in a model 2000 - 3000
FPS drop in catastrophic, tell me what am I doing wrong?

[HE-Cooper]

Nekman, I would be more specific about what you're doing, there are dozens of variables at play, including your machine. Also, trees are far more complicated than just beig some polys. Are these trees you made? Are they in an area with alphas textures, etc etc.

[nekman]

Nekman, I would be more specific about what you're doing, there are dozens of variables at play, including your machine. Also, trees are far more complicated than just beig some polys. Are these trees you made? Are they in an area with alphas textures, etc etc.

Here is a screenshot of the editor, the map is nothing more than just the city walls, a mill, and trees. Created a blank card set one building primitives 16k, if I put 10 buildings will be above normal in the 100k primitives.

[HE-Cooper]

Everything appears to be functiOning correctly for you. In an empty scene with no lighting no terrain and only one asset your fps is about the same as idle fps. But when you add things to a scene and turn on lighting and terrain and multiple objects, your fps goes down as your machine's CPU and ram and graphics memory is utilized.

[nekman]

Everything appears to be functiOning correctly for you. In an empty scene with no lighting no terrain and only one asset your fps is about the same as idle fps. But when you add things to a scene and turn on lighting and terrain and multiple objects, your fps goes down as your machine's CPU and ram and graphics memory is utilized.

Thank you, as it turned out Fraps too much reduces the FPS when recording video