Is polygon count not important anymore?

[quote user="Kanaye x"]The PC Master Race's snobbery being dialed up tenfold, with everyone saying that game consoles are not as powerful as PCs! [/quote]All hail the glorious PC Gaming Master Race.

Actually we'll be on to mocking you console peasants for not having great user made content like the "Sexualised Ogre Mod" for Dragon Age: Origins.....okay, not the best example =)

 

Its funny you mention that Kanaye. I was speaking to a former not long back and he let me know his specs. I was blown away. I thought mine was pretty good for a laptop (4GB ram) but this guy was running circles around that and made mine look ancient lol!!

 

I swear I already posted in here a few mins ago :/



Kaneye its funny you say that mate. I was speaking to a forumer the other day and he let me know his specs. I was blown away! I thought my lappy was fairly good (4GB or something close) and when he told me what his was, it literally ran circles around mine
and then some. I was really shocked. It made mine look ancient! lol

 

Am I the only one here that doesn't know what polygon count is? [tag:clueless]

I like good graphics doe. Dat Haro 4 has some pretty decent polygons lol.

 

Defy, you are not alone. That's why my first post danced around the question lol

 

In minimal geek: Polygon count is the number of polygons (squares, triangles, hexagons, etc) that your system can display at once. The higher the polygon count, the more detailed your image can be.

 

voteDC: lololol

Cloud: Eh, laptops sacrifice raw computing power for portability. While most laptops nowadays are sold with 8 gigs of RAM, I don't expect any of them to blow a desktop PC out of the water in specs.

 

Tater, thanks dude! That's an easy way of understanding something that would of otherwise just shot straight over my head lol.

Kanaye, mine was a budget laptop £300 for 4GB Windows 8. Its served me well so far but I don't imagine it's even going to contend with PC standards lol.

 

Mainly they aren't such a buzzword anymore is because new features like adaptive tessellation make total polygon counts less significant. If the game is optimized well when a character or item is only a couple of dozen pixels onscreen then whatever amount
of polygons are actually needed to maintain the profile and texture coordinates is actually really low.

Also more advanced texture shading features like parallax mapping can use textures to give flat one polygon surfaces the appearance of being tens of thousands of polygons. Couple this with better lighting systems that also help create the illusion of a complicated
surface sometimes faster and more convincingly than if you used a lot of polygons.

There is still a huge amount of room of improvement of how many polygons can be rendered. Currently to render things like foliage you use simple flat sprites or a square polygon with a texture that is transparent to show leaves and blades of grass. Actually
having each blade of grass or twigs and leaves on a tree rendered as a polygon model would bring the best computer setup to a stand still with just a couple trees and bushes in a scene.

Only type of rendering that has promised to do this in real time is rendering using voxels, but only a couple engines have popped up demoing the tech and then disappearing before use in games. Only game currently in development promising this technique is
Everquest Next and how much it uses it remains to be seen.