Hi everyone! I was just wondering what the ideal number of vertices is in a frame or scene while using the game engine? I just read somewhere on the forums that “baking” could help. Not sure what that is since I am still relatively new to blender but I will look for some tutorials about it. I just didn’t know what the optimal number would be for performance that is. For example if in the game at a particular time I am in a room with objects; bookshelfs, tables, candles, tapestry, pens, wires, basically what would normally be a in room. What numbers of vertices should I not go over? Either as a whole for if theirs an ideal number per object. That’s about it! Thanks in advance for any help! Have a good one!
That’s a very tricky question and largely depends on the minimum system requirement you want to aim for in your game. Also important is the camera distance to the objects. Basically the aim is to have as few triangles as possible and as many as nessecairy. Also objects that are not animated and have no physics on them can get away with a much higher number of triangles than animated meshes. Also important are the resolution and amount of textures in the scene, high resolution textures cost a lot of video memory and require a higher texture fill rate on the grafics card to reach good fps.
Also try to use normal maps to get some fake detail on low polygon objects. It requires a lot more work (make high polygon model, make low polygon model, create normalmap) but the end result usually looks a lot better.
In general i would try and get a computer with the minimum specs you want to aim for and test the scene with that. If you drop below 30 fps (or when you feel like the game becomes unplayable), you look for ways to optimize.
Thank you very much! You answered all of my questions and perhaps even more. Couldn’t have asked for a better simple answer, thanks!
Vertices means nothing to GPU, but the FACES.
I’d say it’s more important to be wary of the number of objects, rather than the number of faces. The BGE (and your graphics card) can draw a single mesh with a ton of faces very easily compared to a large amount of low-poly objects.
I just did a quick test.
400.000 faces 1 object - 340 fps.
Now do 400,000 objects each with 1 face, should be a noticeable difference.
Ofcourse,but i dont have the patience to do that.
Its pretty interesting exactly how much using individual objects vs faces is really, I guess its because of all the extra space in memory required for an object compared to a bunch of verts etc.
400,000 faces in one object runs fine, but 20,000 single faced objects and Blender/BGE slows to a crawl…
But yeh, all of this depends on how powerful your hardware is as Morgoth stated.
Indeed the optimal number of vertices is: zero
My game is fastest with zero vertices ;).
BTW: Good request for a benchmark…