66 million polygons per second

can the ps2 really do 66million polygons per second?

No, not in a real game.

does it really matter to you how many polygons metal gear soplid 2 or gran turismo 3 are pushing ?

Yes it can. Actually, according to Sony\'s benchmarks, the GS can pump out 70-75 million polygons per second.

There\'s a catch though.. it\'s all without effects. Once you add in all the other stuff like AA, Texture Maping, Bi 7 Tri linear filtering, FSAA, Bezier curves, Physics, and whatnot the number of Polygons the PS2 can push out drops to around 16-20 Million PPS.

It doesn\'t matter.  If you have a character modeled with 10,000 poly\'s versus one modeled with 50,000... you won\'t notice unless the camera is 2 inches away from his virtual ass.  But then the game is unplayable.  Once you get over 10 million poly\'s, the difference is negligible.  Seriously, the camera HAS to be back to be playable.  The PS2\'s strengths are in it\'s environmental effects.  Lighting, particles, etc.  Thats what sucks you into the game and gives it a realistic appearance.

Besides, it\'s not just a matter of displaying those polygons.  Yah gotta do collision detection and AI routines and animations for the additional 3D models.  You could brag that your system does 500 billion polygons, but it wouldn\'t matter worth a hill of beans if your processor could only DRAW those and not incorporate them into the game (good news: the game has 50,000 characters.  Bad news: they morph through eachother, have no AI, and just glide instead of walking).

[Edited by Ktulu on 12-18-2000 at 08:33 AM]

Past 10 million won\'t show in character models that
much, but character models are great already. After
that you start to see alot more improvement in backgrounds
instead of just character models.  Thats my guess anyways.

Ii, yes and no actually.

Yes, the Emotion Engine\'s capable of calculating that many. But it\'s not exactly in a game situation. You\'d be using it for nothing but polygon calculations, and you wouldn\'t exactly be doing anything with the polygons other simply calculating their vertices...

15-20 million is probably a more reasonable in-game number if you\'re pushing for good polygon usage and texturing. You could slide up or down one way with a slight expense at the cost of other depending on preference.

Or you could use one or the other of the VUs for special effects instead of just pounding out geometry.

well, i am very happy with 20millions, cause my voodoo 3 can only to around 4millions i think heheh

[§ôµÏG®ïñD]

Originally posted by brizk
well, i am very happy with 20millions, cause my voodoo 3 can only to around 4millions i think heheh

not only that.. How many PC games HAVE 4 million polys?.. I know Q3 has 3 million.

damn 3million!!!??? i thought quake3 was alot, with the ps2, i am looking forward to quake 4

Actually it still baffles me, with all the new heavy duty Nvidia cards which supposely can do 20 million poly/sec(which they\'ve claimed equal or beats a PS2), there\'s hardly a real PC game that reach 3 to 4 million poly/sec. All they ever do is pump up the resoultion(which hardly make any difference whne it reaches 1026 x768) or the fps( again, minimal differences after hitting 60 fps).

I wonder how many years it needs to take for the PC to show REAL games that reach GT3 level of graphic quality..

If u consider all that, the PS2 is quite a steal for what it is.

Originally posted by Paul
I wonder how many years it needs to take for the PC to show REAL games that reach GT3 level of graphic quality..

6 months.

6 months.

Considering that the Nvidia T&L cards that supposely do 15 million poly/sec has been out like what??? 1 year already? and best case scenario of 3 to 4 million poly/sec of current top PC games, I DON\'T think so bud.

It takes years to develope games and game engines, none of which would have been ready for nVidia\'s technology.

At the time of the release of nVidia\'s first T&L card, NO PC game supported hardware T&L. Even today, very few do (and only in a limited form), since the implementation of T&L support within DirectX7 and OpenGL drivers was very limited.

Also, nVidia\'s GeForce256 was capable of 15m vertices per second. This can result in 15mpps (as seen in the demos), however the PC game engines were designed for PC graphics cards which expects polygons as streams of 3 vertices each, therefore this effectively cut it\'s polygon rate to 1/3 of it\'s potential.

The next game engines from iD, EPIC and others have been designed specifically with T&L support from the beginning, therefore the performance gains will be massive.

The XBox graphics chip is based on the same technology nVidia are using for their PC graphics cards. Directx8 has full support for T&L as well as support for pixel/vertex shaders. Microsoft conceeded that the PC will exceed the XBox specs within months of it\'s release.

So yes, 6 months is more than enough.

Originally posted by Paul
Actually it still baffles me, with all the new heavy duty Nvidia cards which supposely can do 20 million poly/sec(which they\'ve claimed equal or beats a PS2), there\'s hardly a real PC game that reach 3 to 4 million poly/sec. All they ever do is pump up the resoultion(which hardly make any difference whne it reaches 1026 x768) or the fps( again, minimal differences after hitting 60 fps).

I wonder how many years it needs to take for the PC to show REAL games that reach GT3 level of graphic quality..

If u consider all that, the PS2 is quite a steal for what it is.

Yeah, I\'ve also wondered that myself Paul.  However, if all PC\'s were the same spec, I would expect them to be pushing well over 3-4 million pps.  The reality is that PC developers have to program to the lowest common denominator (i.e. me with my Celeron and Intel AGP Graphics).  Everyone who buys a PC game isn\'t going to have the latest Nvidia graphics chip.  However, Paul,  wouldn\'t it be cool if all PC\'s were the same spec?  If that were the case, then a game could be built that pushes well over 10 million polygons-per-second for all machines.  

Wouldn\'t it be cool if there was a PC with a really, really high-end graphics processor that was built specifically for games?  It would be a mass market product and cost under $300 since it doesn\'t have all that extra PC overhead.  That would rock!  Hell, why stop there!  You could get rid of the monitor (albiet you can use one) and hook it up to your TV.  Even better, you can add DVD playback, controllers, and all the killer-app console titles you want.  Basically this would be a PC-Console hybrid which equals the ultimate game machine, the best of both worlds.  That\'s a cool idea!  Dude, I should sell that idea to a company.  Perhaps Microsoft would like my idea?  Naaaa!  I doubt it.