Tell me about polygoncount

oh happy birthday!

i'll try and work my connections and see if i can make something happen. would u settle for, say, dolly parton instead of eliza dushku? heard she's a bit busy..... hehehehehehhehehhe

 

so a patched celeron 733 with a pushed Gforce4 [XBOX]is
soo much faster then a 1.4g pc with a radeon 8500 (low geforce4 comparable) ?

and ps2 grosso modo a pc 1.4g with radeon8500? hm, sounds reasonable.

 

Don't forget we're talking of a single model displayed here, it's not a real world test with everything the CPU have to do : AI, physics etc... So I don't think CPU plays a great role in this test. Combined that with the fact that Xbox is a closed platform and developpers can code closer to the metal I don't find it really surprising. Oh and in the T&L area GF4 is better than R200 (two full functionnal Vertex Shader)

 

Actually, the EA tests included AI running in the background if I remember correctly. Anyway, this is the closest we have to a real world comparrison of each platform under the same conditions.

BTW, EA actually do optimize for each platform individually, they just don't take advantage of extra graphical features to make their games look different from platform to platform.

 

thanks , but i'm into brunettes. Not old blondes with fake um... fake bags of fat .

 

Isn't "taking advantage of extra graphical features to make their games look different from platform to platform" the same as "optimising"....


i do believe that EA does optimise their multiplatform titles MUCH better than average.

 

For those interrested in the document it's available here : http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2002/ea-shader.pdf

 

So, what's the secret?

 

<cracks up> Best answer EVER!

 

Yeah, baby!

 

Wouldn't 60 million or even 20 million polygons mean that you wouldn’t need bilinear, aniso, FSAA and all that other stuff, because you would inevitably do REYS style rendering?

 

That would be a seriously interesting approach for the current console generation. I hope somebody tries it...

Could this possibly work on a PS2, or is the Reyes approach utterly out of the question?

 

If the claim that PS2 can render +50 million polygons per second is true, then that would be over 3 polygons per pixel at 640 x 480 60 fps.
The question is if the fillrate is up to it, as a lot of it is waisted when drawing such small primitives.

 

Oooh, that's right. I seem to recall someone posting about that elsewhere. Something to the effect that existing rasterizers are designed to achieve maximum performance when projecting a polygon over multiple pixels, not having a pixel cover many polygons. In such a case, the polygon fillrate would fall to some baseline level corresponding to whatever it takes to put a single poly on a single pixel. Did that make any sense? I dunno...

 

Shouldn’t that be a truckload of salt? The table contradicts everything we’ve ever heard about the three machines, most notably is the fact that the PS2 has such inferior performance in a “rawâ€￾ test, the kind were it would normally be expected to shine.
And the high poly counts on the xbox? I thought someone once said that the maximum realistic performance would be somewhere around 31 million polys? I am aware that it has programmable vertex shaders, which with tweaking(/cheating) could help performance, but still..?

 

So these tests were just static polygon data being sent from main RAM? That would seem to explain a lot. Wouldn't it [the winner] just come down to whoever has the most memory to store the most polygon data (assuming the GPU bus isn't bottlenecked)?

 

Just for reference...

The highest maximums achieved that I know of:

Dreamcast - between 3 and 4 million per second
GCN - ~15 million per second (Rogue Leader)
PS2 - ~12-14 million per second (Either J&D or R&C, can't remember which)
XB - ~30 million per second (quoted by ERP) - highest known in-game is around 15 million per second though.

 

Polycounts can be misleading when there is no animation (moving characters require skinning, IK, etc) though, ie: Rogue Leader, Racing games, etc.