Thread: Historical Poly Counts

I stumbled over these numbers on a couple of different sites and just mashed up the lists. I figured that somebody here might find them interesting. This is not my list and I can't vouch for all of these numbers. However, they should make for good point of reference for some of you.

Dead or Alive series, Xbox, 2001-2004

Character – ~10,000-15,000

Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, PS2/Xbox/GC, 2002

Characters - ~7,000-10,000

Mortal Kombat 4, Zeus Arcade Board, 1997

Peak number of polygons per second - 1.2 million quad patches ²

Virtua Fighter 4, Naomi 2, 2001

Jacky - 14,000 polygons

Virtua Fighter 4, PS2, 2002

Jacky - 7,000 polygons

Virtua Fighter 5, Arcade/PS3/X360, 2006

Character – ~40,000 with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Background – 100,000 – 300,000 polygons

Project Gotham Racing 2, Xbox, 2003

Vehicles – 10,000 polygons

Project Gotham Racing 3, X360, 2005

Cars - 80,000-100,000 polygons (interior + exterior), damages add between 10,000 and 20,000 more polygons per car
Brooklyn Bridge - 600,000 polygons (LOD might be included)
Manhattan Bridge - 1 million polygons (LOD might be included)

Midnight Club, Xbox360/PS3, 2007

Cars - 100,000 polygons

Gran Turismo 3, PS2, 2001

Cars - ~2,000-4,000 polygons

Gran Turismo 4, PS2, 2004

Cars - ~2,000-5,000 polygons

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, PS3, 2007

Cars - 200,000 polygons (probably interior + exterior)

V-Rally 3, PS2, 2002

Vehicles - 15,000-16,000 polygons (Might count multi-passes)

Stages - 500,000 polygons

Axel Impact/DTRacer, PS2, 2003/2005

Cars - Base mesh ~12,000 polygons (max LOD)
Volume Shadow mesh - 4,000-5,000 Vert (dynamic shadows are not stored as actual polygons, hence vertex count)
Stages - ~200k polygons

Canned Boss Game Studios game, Xbox, 2002

Cars - 25000 polygons (highest LOD) - 4 textures/poly, Base texture, Reflection map, a texture used to compute a fresnel term, Shadow map, Specular highlight (encoded in the alpha channel of the reflection map)
Backgrounds - 2 or in some cases 3 textures/poly
Peak number of polygons per second - 30M polygons ²

Half-Life, PC, 1998

Zombie – 844 polygons
High Definition pack Zombie- 1700 polygons

Half-Life, Dreamcast, 2000-2001 (Canned)

Zombie - 1649 polygons

Half-Life, PS2, 2001

Zombie - 2822 (Highest LOD)

Halflife 2, PC, 2004

Alyx Vance - 8323 polygons
Barney - 5922 polygons
Combine Soldier - 4682 polygons
Classic Headcrab - 1690 polygons
SMG - 2854 polygons (with arms)
Pistol - 2268 polygons (with arms)

Halo, Xbox, 2001

Masterchief – 2,000 polygons

Quake, PC, 1996

200 polygons with 1 320×200 8bit texture using predefined palette.

Quake 4, PC, 2006

Player model – 2,500 polygons with multiple diffuse, specular and normal maps

Unreal Tournament, PC, 1999

Player model – 800 polygons

Unreal Tournament 2k3, PC, 2003

Player model – 3,000 polygons

Unreal Tournament 3, PC, 2007

Weapon models – 4,500 to 12,000 triangles for the first person view

Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, PC, 2002

Character - 4096 polygons

☼Killzone 3, PS3, 2011

Character - 10,000 polygons + 2,000 if they have large/complex accessories - SRC
Human character heads (separate budget) - ~4,5000 polygonss - SRC

Crysis, PC, 2007

Nano-suit character - 67,000 polygons (uncertain whether it's an in-game model or not) ¹
Characters' heads - ~2500-3000 polygons
Characters' bodies - ~5000 polygons

Gears of War, Xbox 360, 2006

Wretch – 10,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Boomer - 11,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Marcus – 15,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps

Lost planet, X360/PC, 2007

Wayne - 12392 polygons (but finally 17765 polygons for compatibility with motion blur effect)
VS robot - 30-40,000 polygons
Background - ~500,000 polygons
Peak number of polygons per frame - ~ 3 million ²

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, GC, 2002

Link – 2800 polygons

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, GC/Wii, 2006

Link – 6900 polygons

Super Mario Sunshine, GC, 2002

Mario - 1500 polygons
Levels - ~ 60,000 polygons

Jak & Daxter, PS2, 2001

Jak - 4000 polygons

Jak II, PS2, 2003

Jak - 10,000 polygons ¹

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, PS2, 2005

Snake – 4,000 polygons

Dead Rising, X360, 2006

Peak number of polygons per frame - ~ 4 million ²

Resident Evil 4, Gamecube, 2005

Leon - 10,000 polygons

☼Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, PS3, 2007

Main characters – ~20,000-30,000 polygons
Drake – 26,584 polygons (highest LOD) - SRC
Pirates – ~12,000-15,000 polygons

☼Uncharted 2, PS3, 2009

Drake – ~37,000 polygons (No LODs, except for multiplayer) - SRC
NOTE: Lead Character Artist Rich Diamant cites 37k while Lead Programmer Pal Engstad cites 80k. I'm only going with the lower number because what artist DOESN'T know his own poly counts?
Chloe - 2,500 polygons (min LOD) - 45,000 polygons (max LOD)

☼God of War III, PS3, 2010

Kratos – ~20,000 polygons

GTA San Andreas, PS2, 2004

Characters – 2,000 polygons with 1 256×256 8bit texture
NPCs - 1,200 polygons with 1 256x128 8bit texture
Gant bridge - 16,000 polygons, includes LOD

GTA IV, Xbox 360/PS3, 2008

Story Characters – 8-10,000 polygons with multiple 256×256/512×512 diffuse, specular and normal maps

Deathrow, Xbox, 2002

Characters - up to 7,000 polygons - 55 bones - 1024x1024 textures on the bodies and 512x512 on the faces

Lair, PS3, 2007

Main dragon plus its rider - 150,000 polygons
16x16KM scene - 134M polygons (streamed into memory, not loaded at run time)

Kingdom Under Fire : The Crusaders, Xbox, 2004

Main characters - 10,000 polygons
Characters - 3,000 - 4,000 polygons

☼Final Fantasy X-2, PS3, 2003

Main characters - ~7,000 -10,000 polygons ¹

☼Final Fantasy XIV Benchmark, PC, 2010

haracters - ~6,000 -????? polygons - SRC ³

Mass Effect, X360, 2007

Sheppard + armor + weapons - ~20,000-25,000 polygons

¹ Might be a cut-scene model
² No precisions whether it's actual rendered polygons or just the number of polygons sent to transform, pre Z-pass and culling.
³ Need more sources

Some great games here too. I would've never figured this out on my own so thank you for sharing! :thumb:

Edited the list a little. Did a little rearranging to try and organize them according to genre.

nice thanks again

100000 poly car jesus i knew it was allot but not that much

Yah, racing games tend to be really high res because of the little to no deformation that has to go on and how limited the tracks can be.

Anyway, thanks for this Cookepuss, this was really needed and should hopefully answer a lot of questions. I guess over time people can post new info and update it. :thumb:

Edit: I believe the listed poly values for Uncharted are for the cut scene models. They have two model sets for in game and cut scenes, the in game ones were somewhere in the teens if I remember correctly.

Originally Posted by Elmo

100000 poly car jesus i knew it was allot but not that much

Yeah, but it's rarely ever as bold a number as it appears. Racers always look like they're pushing the hardware limits when they're really just smoke & mirrors.

Like fighting games, racers have a very fixed and finite definition of the universe. With a fighting game, your entire world is a ring that's maybe 30'x30'. That lets you blow your whole budget on this complex scene.

With a racing game, even with detours, you're basically living a life on rails. You can dump a whole lot of detail into the cars because the track is neither open, nor does it stretch forward into infinity. The track twists and turns. Everything from mountains to buildings keep you from having too long of a draw distance, one that would either cripple the hardware or demand a reduction to scene details. And, since the track passes by and breakneck speeds, you can take clever shortcuts on the scenery and nobody notices. Even when you get post-race replays, those camera angles are very carefully chosen.

Originally Posted by Daelus

believe the listed poly values for Uncharted are for the cut scene models

I'll look into it and see what I can find. However, as a little food for thought, here's Nathan Drake's in-game model for Uncharted 2. That's some crazy detail.



EDIT>>> Actually, it's totally possible that Drake may be 30k. [URL="http://www.ps3center.net/news/4195/uncharted-2-production-work-details/"]According to a few sources, Drake was actually upped to 37k for his in-game model. According Rich Diamant, the lead CA, Drake never gets a LOD except for multiplayer. WYSIWYG. The might well be the case for U1 too.

Originally Posted by cookepuss

I'll look into it and see what I can find. However, as a little food for thought, here's Nathan Drake's in-game model for Uncharted 2. That's some crazy detail.

I looked into it and I can't actually find where I saw it last, so I may be just making stuff up. Anyway, they certainly are among the highest.

Found sources for this stuff.

UNCHARTED 1: Lead CA Rich Diamant talks about the 22k-30k counts for the lead characters here on ZBC: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showpos...5&postcount=10 Confirming this with some more exact numbers is this screen: http://i48.tinypic.com/2ziao2g.jpg Other posts by Rich suggest that Drake used multiple LODs, as you suggested.

UNCHARTED 2: Although the lead programmer does his best to convince us that Drake had 80k polys, Lead CA Rich Diamant once again comes in with some more solid numbers in this ZBC post: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showpos...4&postcount=20 That same source suggests that, unlike Chloe or the other Uncharted 2 characters, Drake does not use multiple lower count LODs this time around. The only exception is for multiplayer. That might be part of the dramatic performance boost that the programmer was referring to. Also, instead of using fixed LODs, I think that they're using automatic progressive mesh generation.

interesting to see the numbers, thanks!

A lot of these games will be using LODs. In fact I think Uncharted 2 is the only one that I've heard of where they publicly stated Drake didn't use LODs.

When I worked on a driving game a few years ago, the highest level vehicle LOD was only used for the player car, or only in the vehicle selection screen where you were only drawing one at once. The non-player (or non-active I should say as you can switch for replays) cars only used the second level LOD at best. They never got close enough to the screen for it to show.

This is the key trick. Many games will only use the highest LOD like this, or only in cutscenes. I think Gears does this according to the Character Modelling 2 book. That also reduces the number of textures used and complexity of shaders, number of bones and AI and all sorts. You only show what you need to.

So really what we're looking at here are the highest possible version of the assets, that often won't actually be the ones used when playing.

I know Cooke knows this, but thought it worth clarifying before everyone makes their cars 200,000 polys and wonders why everything runs too slowly.

Yeah. That's why, in the mod community, the cars end up being on 20%-25% of that much large number.

Warcraft III 2002
Heroes - 900-1600 triangles
Units - 400-700 triangles
Buildings - 600-800 triangles

World of Warcraft 2004
Characters - 4000-6000 polygons

Interesting, racing games seem to have 5 times as many polygons as non racing games.