How many Tris are being rendered in a 3d game these days? I was surprised that my card was able to render 500,000 tris at 10 fps. and that's just a 9600 mob... I thought it would be around 50,000. But then I read something about Far cry to render 200,000 tris in a scene....

aha....

but I cant really think of how many pixels I'm drawing.
It's so easy to keep track your tris, but pixels...

What the actual fill-rate is isn't really that important. What is important is your game can render scenes at a playable fps on your target hardware. If fps changes significantly when you change the resolution then you're fill-rate limited meaning to get better performance you'll have to reduce fragment shader complexity, reduce overdraw, lower the amount of passes per frame etc.

Well, ....ehh.... yes!

If your game is too slow you can either draw less or draw it more efficiently to make it faster. I' aware of that...

no, I thought of comparing my polygon count to the one in latest games, and see how bad my skills are.
I can render about 40.000 tris at excceptable frame rate on my 9600 mob. So.... is that good or bad?

What frame rate and what kind of triangles? Are they unlit and untextured or do they have full per-pixel bump-mapping with gloss mapping? You've got a give a description of what kind of things you're rendering and the fps you're getting if you want to know if your game is really running as fast as it can.

Though IMO if it runs at a decent frame rate on your target hardware then it's fast enough, even if it could be faster it probably won't really make much of a difference,

Well, of course it depends on how you texture and lighten your triangles and how complex your shaders are and what else you do with your cpu...

I simply started this threat because I wanted to get an orientation . I think fps are a good measure to compare two engines.
For example: I was surprised how 'fast' Far Cry is actually running on my notebook and that the view distance is about one km.
On the other side there are games which obviously run slower although the scene complexity isn't even as great as the one in Far Cry.

How else do you wanna compare two engines? I don't believe that there wouldn't be a much better way to render things sometimes...

ok, ok then. Let's say I wanna render objects using one texture unit and do lighting with a vertex shader.
So I have to pass a vertex, uv coordinates for my texture, and the normal to my graphics card.
Using OpenGL, what do you think would be the 'best' solution to pass these information to the graphics card and still support compatibility for older cards such as GeForce 3 or 4???

And to satisfy you I don't even ask how many tris you could render at how many fps by doing this :)