I was playing Crysis yesterday & enabled the developers console for fun. Am I wrong or does Tris stands for triangles? Is it possible that this engine is, at that moment, rendering 3000000 triangles?

well, that could be an explanation of why it doesn't work at full settings in any pc, except new gamer pc's

But 3000000 triangles? That's like.. totally high-poly. I've looked a bit on a web just now & it seems that the in-game characters are approximately 60k-80k Cutscene characters are going around 120k.

Yes, this is totally possible

From what I understood when talking to the Lead environment artist here at Guerrilla Games, we also render around this (somewhere between 1 and 3 million Tri's) per frame.

The trick though is, pc's nowadays can handle this amount, but adding textures and all these kind of shaders and shadowmaps, that's what makes it slow down to a halt. basically you'll have to make a very good manager for this, and it's possible

regards,

Incredible, I never really looked up the new game scene polycounts, & this game is from 2007 so it's not really that new, but this is amazing.

..so that's why some of the newer games have sort of low-quality textures here & there. Dark Messiah of Might & Magic has a very nice design but very poor texture quality.

Well, no, dont get me wrong, not every engine is capable of this.
Dark messiah is based on valve's Source engine, which is also slowly growing more out-dated (there are some games that extend the engine, like L4D and Team Fortress, but those are completely different cases :P).

But mainly, engines (the top ones out there, Unreal, Crytek etc etc) don't really have a "limit" on their Triangle rendering.

regards,

actual crysis model polycounts is something like
teammates 22-24k
korean soldiers 12-16k polys

also from what i remember from the course Tris stands for total level polygon count without LODs.(if it does not change when you move the camera, it's probably what i say it is. but i do not remember perfectly.)

Hm, I wonder how they count the triangles rendered, since they could as well count the triangles which are rendered in shadow map passes, which would increase the amount of triangles rendererd per frame a lot. Like if your scene contains about 1000K tris, if you are rendering two shadow maps, the tris rendered could as well jump up to 1400K.

That being said, its completely possible to render a ton of triangles. Modern GPUs can process a load of vertexes in a very short time. The thing that matters is the pixel calculation complexity. Calculating lighting and several other effects are often done with textures (image space) nowadays which puts much more strain on pixel processing stage.

I think this is the reason for this polycount. I saw this in several engines that their statistic tools displayed me way more tris than I put into the level. Probably these came from the shadow generation process, maybe also from creating depth maps, I am just guessing. But a fact is, that they generate additional tris and not just a few.