Low poly counts and Doom 3

[Dave B(TotalVR)]

Ive heard a lot of talk popping in all sorts of threads about Doom 3 and its low poly counts.

Just thought it would be better to keep it in a single thread. I, personally, think ID are gonna get it exactly right with the polygon counts because lets not forget what Doom is about, mass meanie murder. Also, the shadowing system of Doom3 uses stencil volumes which are polygons that require transforming just like entity polys. I dont know if carmack is doing the soft shadow technique used in villagemark or he has some other solution or what but I do know that this technique uses many overlapping stencil volumes and it sends poly counts soaring on otherwise low detailed models.

In doom3 everything is casting a shadow so this stencil shadowing technique could mean that Doom3 still pushes the transformation units on current graphics cards as apposed to pure fillrate. Of course IMO the main cause of Doom 3's performance hunger will be the actually stencil operations which (seeing villagemark) are very slow on traditional renderers.

What do you guys think?

 

[Fuz]

I am speaking from a gamers point of view, so all the technical details explaining why the poly count might seem low doesn't really mean much to me. What matters to me is what I am seeing on my monitor, not how it got there.

I remember people saying that you need to see it in action before you can say its poly count is low. Well after playing around with it for a couple of days now, I have to say that it does seem to have a low poly count. JMHO of course. Don't get me wrong, over all graphics are fantastic. The first time I saw it, it was one of those "wow" moments for me. The last time I had one of those moments on a pc was when I saw Unreal for the first time.

Of course, I will wait for the final to make my final judgement on the poly issue, but as it stands now, in the alpha, it seems low to me.

 

[Randell]

I just think it depends on what you want - fantastic lighting/bumpmaps or high polys because we dont have current hardware that can do both at 60fps+ at 1024x768 (notwithstanding AA).

UT2003 seems to be high poly, texture detail - 'average lighting'. Its cool to have both approaches to consider, but I think Doom3 'overall' looks better.

Can we have both? What other games available can offer similar comparisons? The only other game I have which has great shadow and dynamic lighting effects is NWN and full shadows/lighting tanks framerate, especially with AA. Is that the nature of the beast or is it poor coding?

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Just thought it would be better to keep it in a single thread. I, personally, think ID are gonna get it exactly right with the polygon counts because lets not forget what Doom is about, mass meanie murder.

Actually, Doom3 will NOT be about "mass meanine" murder ala Doom I/II. It has been stated time and again that this game is all about "atmosphere". It will actually be "slow" in terms of pace. So lowering poly counts is not being done so that Id can throw massive amounts of meanies at you.

It's low simply due to performance considerations.

I remember people saying that you need to see it in action before you can say its poly count is low. Well after playing around with it for a couple of days now, I have to say that it does seem to have a low poly count.

I agree. However, to be fair, my rig (PIII 700, 192 MB Ram, Radeon 8500) runs this leak pretty much as a slide show (when it's not just crashing). And if you are not seeing the action in "fluid" motion (at least a constant 30 FPS), you still cannot fully apreciate the visuals.

So I would say that at this point, the only people who could probably make a reasonable guestimate of the visuals based on this leak, are probably those who greater than P4 2 Ghz CPUs and have a 9700 Pro...or possibly GeForce4 Ti 4600 cards.

Of course IMO the main cause of Doom 3's performance hunger will be the actually stencil operations which (seeing villagemark) are very slow on traditional renderers.

Quite possible.

On the other hand, it may be something along the lines of drastically reduced fill rate efficiencey with per-pixel lighting in general and small polygons.

Many generations ago, "large polygon" and "small polygon" fill rate comparison tests were popular, and illustrated nicely how fill rate efficiency took a nose dive as polygon size decreases. We may be looking at a similar issue with dot-3 / perpixel lighting. As the average size of the polygons gets smaller, fill rate efficiency might take a similar nose-dive. Meaning: it's may not necessarily the number of polygons in a given scene that is really driving Doom's visuals, but the average polygon size per scene.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

The actual poly count of Doom3 monsters isn't that low; it's just their detailed shading that makes it more evident than in Unreal. I mean those models don't even have seperate fingers...

 

[Ilfirin]

Turning off the shadows actually makes the game look a lot better IMO.. all the low-polyness goes away and everything looks a lot more natural.

But then, I am often called 'The Shadow Nazi' for a reason..

 

[Ante P]

The low polygon count shows, especially when viewing monsters from certain angles etc.

As for performance people have GROSSLY underestimated their rigs performance by using the

exec runact.cfg

command wich loads THE WHOLE FRIKKING DEMO into your RAM casuing major swapfile usage etc.

I have a Ti4600 on a KT400 with 256 MB DDR333 and a XP 1900+ and it runs at ~45 fps pretty much all the time.
Certainly fast enough to be fully playable at 800x600 except for some odd fps drops every now and then.

But anyways: point is: the polygon counts ARE too low. It looks ugly. The bump mapping is too exagerated for my taste, makes everything look like it's made out of the same material: some plastic/metallic surface.

having "solid" shadows isn't really that great either. It's not like eveything is pitch black just because something casts a shadow on it.

also the same problem that is seen in titles that use volumetric shadows (ie JKII etc.) are seen in Doom 3 too
shadows that wind up in the wrong places (look at the close up of the guys face during the inro of "level" 1)

personally I'm not that impressed, but I guess there's time for improvement to say the least

also as pointed out earlier, some of the textures seems to be at a way too low res (walls especially)

the game itself seems like it could be pretty cool though

 

[Megadrive1988]

perhaps a future iteration of the Doom3 enigne will have higher polygon counts. As Q3 did over Q1 and Q2.

 

[nggalai]

perhaps a future iteration of the Doom3 enigne will have higher polygon counts. As Q3 did over Q1 and Q2.

Or, future games using the DooM3 engine will use higher polycounts.

Also, people, please don't forget that the leak is rather old, features some place holder content, and isn't representative of newer builds or the final product, performance-wise.

ta,
-Sascha.rb

 

[Laa-Yosh]

But anyways: point is: the polygon counts ARE too low. It looks ugly. The bump mapping is too exagerated for my taste, makes everything look like it's made out of the same material: some plastic/metallic surface.

Bump maps aren't exagarated - it's actually quite subtle, especially the speculars. And keep in mind that the alpha hasn't really got the shaders worked out - I'm sure Carmack can do some magic like velvet and anisotropic shading models...

having "solid" shadows isn't really that great either. It's not like eveything is pitch black just because something casts a shadow on it.

More lights would obviously brighten up the shadows, however they'd cost performance. There is a reason to Doom3 taking a horroristic direction instead of the previous games...

also the same problem that is seen in titles that use volumetric shadows (ie JKII etc.) are seen in Doom 3 too
shadows that wind up in the wrong places (look at the close up of the guys face during the inro of "level" 1)

I hope Carmack can solve that... However there's a chance he cannot, in which case we'll have to live with it. Shadow maps could show worse artifacting...

personally I'm not that impressed, but I guess there's time for improvement to say the least

I'm pretty impressed

 

[Asm]

Well, I think it looks great but I was more impressed by Blade of Darkness when it came.

/Asm

 

[Nagorak]

Games are not about shadows. We used to have games where the only shadow was a little circle under your character. I don't think anyone really cared one way or another. Shadows add almost nothing to the game and as far as Doom3s other lighting it's equally unimpressive since everything is just dark. You can have a scary atmosphere without everything being dark and boring (see SS2). Doom3=Drab and boring, not scary.

 

[Brimstone]

I not only liked System Shock 2 but also Thief. From what I understand were built with the same engine. I wouldn't call Thief scary, but it certainly had a lot of tension as you moved around a level trying to stay hidden by lurking in darkness.

i really intrested to see what happens MOD wise with Doom 3. The game is going to sell an incredible amount of copies and ID seems very commited to making MOD tools availble from the outset. With a large installed base, I'm sure we'll end up seeing some extremley talented and motivated MOD teams producing some ambitious games.

 

[Reverend]

Don't forget this site's interview with JC (the first question).

 

[gkar1]

Ante P you do not have the right hardware to run the leaked demo. On my Radeon 9700 it looks very yummy.

Here have a taste:

http://www.speakeasy.org/~gkar1/doom3/

All of the shots have 16xAF and some form of AA enabled(6x and 4x). I forget which shots have which tho

 

[FUDie]

Games are not about shadows. We used to have games where the only shadow was a little circle under your character. I don't think anyone really cared one way or another. Shadows add almost nothing to the game and as far as Doom3s other lighting it's equally unimpressive since everything is just dark. You can have a scary atmosphere without everything being dark and boring (see SS2). Doom3=Drab and boring, not scary.

Games are not about graphics, games are about gameplay (see Tetris).

 

[Sharkfood]

I dont see low polycounts being any intrinsic engine deficiency, but instead a good compromise for release date vs. acceptable hardware at that time.

I think the really incredible use of the Doom3 engine, complete with higher polygon counts, will be seen 4-9 months after Doom3's release by 3rd party developers licensing the engine. By this stage, a P4-3.0ghz will be $150 and the R300/NV30 will be the 2nd generation and about $100-$150 cheaper... so developers will be able to ramp up the detail a bit without their game forums being swamped by P3-500 w/ MX200 owners complaining.

 

[Ante P]

Ante P you do not have the right hardware to run the leaked demo. On my Radeon 9700 it looks very yummy.

Here have a taste:

http://www.speakeasy.org/~gkar1/doom3/

All of the shots have 16xAF and some form of AA enabled(6x and 4x). I forget which shots have which tho

is my HIS and/or Gigabyte 9700 Pro somehow inferiour to yours?

the videocard doesn't increase the polygon count, not does it stop textures from looking way too "bumped"
I think the bump mapping is exagerated no matter what other people think, it simply makes some stuff look too "soft" when it rather should have a "cold" sterile metallic surface etc.

nor does a videocard make the shadows look any different
sometimes they overlap the wrong surfaces and I don't like that they are solid
plus the borders of them are way to sharp

some textures are too low res too, your videocard doesn't help there either (and yes I run with aniso so that's not the problem)

I'm not saying that the game will suck or anything I'm just saying that I'm not impressed with the progress as of yet and that I expect that some of the "dilemmas" will be there in the final version too (low polycounts, "solid" shadows, too bumpy etc.)
no AA, AF or videocard will help me there

the physics aren't that good either, touch a box lying on the floor and it reacts as if you played soccer with it

and oh, did I mention that the weapons are REALLY ugly?

 

[jjayb]

As a fan of System shock 2 and thief myself, I would love to see sequels to these games made with the doom3 engine. Every time I play this leak I can't help but think how much more incredibly scary they would be with the lighting in this game.

If you guys want to see some great lighting effects type this in the console:

give weapon_flare
give ammo

have fun tossing the flares around. They make for some great lighting effects.

 

[Ilfirin]

..The engine behind Thief 3 is looking/sounding to be significantly better than Doom (which I was not impressed by btw.. but that happens with this old of tech).
How they use the technology is a different matter.

Oh, and it isn't that Doom is low-poly (~140K per-scene is not exactly what I would call 'low-poly'), it is that A) they are spending the polys on more 'stuff' rather than higher quality silhouettes on the low-res models and B) they are flat shading almost all the low-res models (id chose to do this rather than work towards a real sollution to the shadow popping problem of shadow volumes).