I have several 3000 poly models in Maya and animations. I need to calculate how well the engine will handle objects of this scale. I may have missed something in the documentation, but is there a gudie to the engine's poly limits and fps limits. I have 128mb Nvidia card, to my mind, I have a pretty large texture map space to use.

3K Poly no problem just use clip_size 0;

the engne is running on my test pc (P400 and a radeon9700pro) and a framerate of ~30-40 with about 120.000 visible triangles at a time. Allthough it depends how many and how big textures you use.

90.000 tris with high quality textures
and almost 200.000 with standard to low poly textures.
Animated vertices cost also some time (not much but anyway)

so you should be able to use about 120.000 - 140.000 triangles for a game with a6 (more with better gfx cards and cpus).

Testing my testlevel with almost 700.000 faces on a P4 prescott with a 9800pro got me about 45-60 fps (with applied template codes and player movement/weapons)...all in 1024/768/32.

updating to the newest ati betadriver i got alomst +30% speed in every game and gs as well.

A6 is pretty fast, but has some major break points that slow the engine:
1.) huge textures and lots of them reloading often is kolling every standard gfx card and escpecially gs levels.
2.) terrian renders as hell on my system (100.000 textured faces for a terrain doesnt bother my card) but the fact that a transistion system is missing for a smooth terrain transformation from lowpoly to highpoly (just entire culling is avaible) makes hmps a bit of a problem for fps games. Its simply useless to see all 50.000 faces of a mountain that is far back on the screen...that slows down a lot.
3.) particles....dont know why but gs hates particles in huge ammount and with alpha maps (like every engine)...but gs cant stand them especially
4.) models run thru the engine very smooth and even highpoly is rendered fast and nice...only thing to think of here is skin size (might change if mulitlayers are avaible)

in general: use every LOD method and clipping possibility you get...simply skin changing and leveldesigning can be a wonder for a good fps.

a nice benchmark level with terrain, enemies, a level complex and shaders would be nice for A6.

@Blattsalat: How badly does texture size affect speed? how different would say a 512X512 be to a 1024x1024 texture. Does it matter it the textures are preloaded?

1024/1024 is four times as big as 512/512 and therefor the reloading would take also four times longer. Doesnt bother you if you only have to reload one or two textures but if you have 200 of those at a time, it can start to harm your fps very badly.

Imagine every model in your game as a "painting by number" picture. If the gpu has to draw 1000 number fileds instead of only 200, it will take a lot longer for him to finish the single object.
If you have lots of those models it will take a lot longer.

Most people think that faces slow down a game. But thats only partwise true. CPU´s can handle lots and lots of wireframe coordinates at once. They only start to struggle if they have to fill all faces with texture pixels. And the more they add into them the longer it takes to display.

simple example from my test level:
a crowd of people 30 á 2200 faces a character results with a 1024/1024 skin: 66.000faces and a 10-30 frames per second.

same characters with an alternative skin 512/512:
results in 30-45 fps.

Jsut make some test your own to see how much your game would speed up if your simply resize all textures down one number.

Prelaoding got rid of any slight pause when a model came on the screen for the first time, but I didn't know the texture size greatly affected anything other than that. Thanks for the info.

Doesn't mip mapping take care of that problem (provided you've got enough VGA memory for all the models with their mip maps)? The larger textures should only be rendered whe close up in that case, shouldn't they?

Thanks, I'm also wondering about the scaling of textures. I have some rooms in my level where textures are scaled 2X for the ceiling and floor. ON my desktop they run just fine, but on my Laptop (P42.6Ghz, ATI Mobility 9000) blocks of the texture will black out as I move. All level textures are 512X512, and this problem occurs in rooms where 1 or two fo the textures have been scaled up.