hope someone can shed some light or point me in the right direction for resources:
I am looking for information regarding the level of detail in environments that the new consoles/current technology can support. The topic came up whilst during a discussion on appropriate levels of detail required in environment concept art.
haha :) With Gears of War it must have been a very long piece of highly talented string.
Hey there is some basic info on this regarding UE3 @ Unreal Technology.
Over 100 million triangles of source content contribute to the normal maps
Wireframe reveals memory-efficient content comprising under 500,000 triangles.
Normal Maps & Texture maps
We are authoring most character and world normal maps and texture maps at 2048x2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC's in the 2006 timeframe. Next-generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2X, and low-end PC's up to 4X, depending on texture count and scene complexity.
Environments
Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 500,000 to 1,500,000 rendered triangles.
Lights
There are no hardcoded limits on light counts, but for performance we try to limit the number of large-radius lights affecting large scenes to 2-5, as each light/object interaction pair is costly due to the engine's high-precision per-pixel lighting and shadowing pipeline. Low-radius lights used for highlights and detail lighting on specific objects are significantly less costly than lights affecting the full scene.KILLA DEE2006-12-08 01:11:47