Tris per tree?

[Rennn]

Anyone know about how many tris/surfaces I should be at for a tree, assuming there's going to be a lot of trees around in a foresty setting? I'm between 3-4k right now.

[Ghogiel]

Depends on the game, complexity of the scene, complexity of the shader, what kind of LOD technology you have available, how the engine handles instancing and batching, and last but not least how much overdraw is going on and how much that slows down the per frame render time.

 

Hard to say numbers.. 1-2k tris can be acceptable on fps games even on last gen consoles like the 360. Assuming the platform is PC and you are making some LODs 3ktris probably won't hurt all that much. One level I worked on in CE2 had like 10k trees on the map plus weather affects. And reworking the LODs for the trees cut per frame rendertime to a third. Of course the level designers on that map were the devil and needed to be slapped for their gluttonous use of these assets in the first place... wide open vistas in snowy mountains with pine forests everywhere.. like more than one forest.

 

Best thing to do is make a test, hopefully if you have access to other diag tools in the engine besides fps counters or actually finding the bottlenecks are hard, keep dumping trees down and observe the per frame render time and how much that increases.

 

Might be best to run the test on something less than a 780 titan to gauge performance on :tongue:

Edited February 14, 2014 by Ghogiel