SSBM is 60fps at all times, I have yet to see any slowdown in it whatsoever.
Try turning off all items but Pokeballs, and then constantly pick them up and throw them on the ground (in a 4 player match). I'm sure you'll notice slowdown. BTW, this is the only time I have ever seen slowdown, and every other time, even with constant action on the scree, it runs very smoothly.
The tracks consist of 500,000 polygons and cars 11,000, now if my calculations are correct. 500,000 polygons at 30fps brings that total on screen to 15mps plus an additional 330,000 from the cars.
The over all total becomes 15,330,000 polygons persecond.
Let's make this a little more reasonable.
500,000 polygons on the track... we will probably see no more than 30% of the track (unless it's a really short track)
500,000 * .3 = 150,000
If we have 10 cars (unless this is daytona/nascar racing, we won't have to worry about 30 cars) that makes at the max...
11,000 * 10 = 110,000
110,000 + 150,000 = 260,000
260,000 * 30 = 7,800,000
Well within Nintendo's conservative estimate for the GC. Please understand that this would be the theoretical max if you only see 30% of the entire track, and you have 10 cars on the screen, and they don't have some sort of "not rendering what's not seen" algorithm going on. If they had that kind of algorithm, I'd have to say that only 75% of each car model would be shown at once, making the number from 11,000 to 8,250 and 110,000 to 82,500 and 7.8 million to 6.975 million. I'm assuming they are not doing this so I'd estimate 7.8 million polys per second.
Now if we look into bump mapping, fill rate, and other statistics, we might find something the GC might not handle well, but given the numbers, I'm pretty certain that the GC could handle the poly count.
