how many triangles at the most??

hi guys

i am interested in your opinion. how many triangles have you had at the most within on rendercycle.
at the moment i am doing a little project in delphi and would be interested what the practical limits are.

thanks for sharing your wisdom,
martin

My rather lame attempt so far is rendering ~25000 tris at 30 fps on a gf2\athlon700. This is using indexed triangles and no special api’s. About the only optimisation I have so far is that all objects are sorted by renderstate to minimise pipeline state changes.

I’m sure that I can push it much father than that with strips and vertex arrays however…

nVidia’s Spheremark manages 16mil(on my machine), and I’m only getting 750,000tris so far…

My terrain environment engine can push 100k tris/frame @30fps. It’s mainly CPU-limited, and support for multiple processors is comming up in a near future.

Number of triangles in a scene does not matter that much, it’s what you can DO with the triangles you draw that matters.

I use a GF2MX on a 2xP3 system.

Originally posted by Bob:
[b]My terrain environment engine can push 100k tris/frame @30fps. It’s mainly CPU-limited, and support for multiple processors is comming up in a near future.

Number of triangles in a scene does not matter that much, it’s what you can DO with the triangles you draw that matters.

I use a GF2MX on a 2xP3 system.[/b]

thanks for your insights
the reason why i am asking. i had some terrain in an own thread with apx. 30.000 points. all in delphi - though i don’t think that matters too much.
i had no translates in it and it just rendered with apx. 15 fps. with some frustum culling i am now at apx. 80 fps, but of course i want to put some objects on my terrain, so i want to find out where the limits are.
what do you mean - a little more specific - “what you can DO” with the triagnles.

thanks,
martin

You can emulate perpixel lighting by sending an extremely highly tesselated object to OpenGL. Or, you can do “true” perpixel lighting with a low teseelated object. You might end up with the same visual effect, but with different amount triangles.

In the first case, you get the the effect by throwing hoards of “standard” triangles. In the second case, you throw a few “smart” triangles.

This is what I mean with “what you can do with them”. A high number does not always means good stuff. If you can use the triangles you have in a smart way, instead of trying to increase the number of triangles, you might end up with a better visual result.