Quote:Original post by cignox1
I think that the Quake (I) engine is heavily limited about the polygons count. Don't know about the Quake (III) engine. You may try to download some free 3d engine and use a simple model.
@dgreen02: wich graphic card do you use? 1000 polys per mesh, 1000 meshes and 60fps means 60.000.000 polys/sec. The product copmparison utility on the ati site shows 325M for the 9800 and 712.5M for the x800 pro, so you are way under the limits of the hw. I suppose that a highly optimized engine one should obtain at least 200M on a decently new card.

BY THE WAY: someone knows why the products comparison tool says: "*Not applicable for Radeon® X1000 series and higher."? For me, that's because the x1000 didn't improve the geometric side too much, but only the v.s. and p.s. :-)

It's not all about triangle rasterization you know, those tests are performed on static vertex data, in dgreen02
's demo every vertex has skinned, thus the transformation cost is much higher than that. Most hardware also performs alot better when drawing as many triangles in one DP call as possible.
I guess that dgreen02 draws each character with a single dp, so 1000 dp's.
It is possible (on newer card) to use hardware instacing and get better performance, but a skinned vertex is probably 4x as expensive as a static vertex (not counting the added amount of memory needed to be processed by the GPU, think bone transforms).

Thank you guys for your answers.
I am sooooo disapointed because I did not know about Dead Rising the X-box 360 as eq mentioned, and my project was *exactly* the same concept. Mmm, I guess it was not that original then... So to answer Rasmadrak, this is the reason why I wanted to make sure that a thousand of animated characters could be displayed on the screen. The Dead Rising screenshots are impressive.

dgreen02's demo looks very encouraging too. Thank you for your answer !

Well, thank you all, I am going to look for a rope now that I know that my little project's concept is being developped by an army of professionals at Capcom's ;)
StratBoy61