Echo from the past: 100000 triangles

[Vandar]

Interesting. I just made test to put 100000 colored trangles on screen by OpenGL and it did it at still 60 FPS and 10% CPU load on this core I5 ... graphics have come a long way since I made my last polygon renderer on X-Windows some time in the 1990s (currently re-doing some old space game code in OpenGL).

It seems I no longer need to worry about polygon counts for this project ... or should I really go at it and make use of being able to display this much polys?

[eugeneloza]

I was investigating polycount problem in modern games (and not done yet). At this moment I have the result: ~300 000 tris for the scene (total) to get ~30 fps at a modern, but not-high-end graphic card.
The problem is not the 'colored triangles' but 'textured triangles with shaders'. I.e. I believe, that there may be much more for just colored triangles, but more efficient&eyecandy to use normal map & lesser polycount.
Also pay attention that most of the calculations is done in the GPU, so CPU load is not informative.

[rogerdv]

According to what Ive read, the cards are optimized for producing triangles. There is not much difference between 500 or 3000 polys, they take the same effort for a modern card. Thats why we set the poly limit in our project to 4000. The problem is in shaders, materials, etc.

[Vandar]

I've got a planet with 300.000 colored (and smoothly shaded, but no shader programs used) triangles showing up in 60FPS on some unknown Intel Laptop graphics chip. About 500.000 triangles seem to be the limit for this hardware, from there the FPS begin to drop.

[Sauer2]

What about other things than triangles?

For example, modern particle engines that work on the GPU are said to support up to a million particles. If those aren't polygons, what are they instead?
One wouldn't simply draw lines for that, or?

[Vandar]

a) I made the test on a laptop which isn't particularly well suited for 3D graphics.
b) I've been using OpenGL 1.1 API

I saw such demos. It's a question of coding mostly. New OpenGL API with clever use of shader programs make it possible. OpenGl can also draw points of a given size, so it's possibel that the programmers use sized points instead of triangles, thus cutting the vertex count by 3. But I don't know for sure.