Hi Gamedev!

I've regularily visited your website in the last couple of days and i thought i'd finally register to ask my question.

I'm a game modder not a dev. I have a question about game engines in general. Please bare in mind that i'm a modder so just want to point out how it would be if the engine could handle it, not what the game devs have to do to make it run on standard components.

Could an RTS game engine support 10-12 Billion polygons on screen at once (i've multiplied millions of tris x fps), or is that impossible in general?

I've read that drawcells are more important that polygon count. Lets say that there are between 2k-3k units on screen at once.

If it's possible which components would be needed to run it?, RTX 3080, 3090?

Really hope you can help me! ?

Thanks!

Hi Vilem ?

It's maybe for a game in the future, can't say which because i don't know if it will be released ?

I know millions are possible but what about billions? ?

@Newgamemodder A back of the envelope calculation puts the memory requirement for 10 billion tris in the hundreds of billions minimum, so that sounds like it's pushing it a bit even if the hardware was fast enough. What are we really talking about though? Is this the requirement to build your whole world, or do they really need to be loaded on screen at the same time. You can do a lot with LOD algorithms if you are just talking about world size.

Newgamemodder said:
I know millions are possible but what about billions?

I'd say it makes no sense to have billions of triangles as long as we have only millions of pixels on screen. ; )

So what we need is a level of detail system to scale detail down so it matches screen resolution.

Also, on current GPUs it's not efficient to have triangles at pixel size, as they process 2x2 blocks of pixels per triangle. So either we want larger triangles than that, or we want to replace HW triangle rasterization with some compute solution like Dreams or UE5 have shown.

Forgot to add my billions are without shadows :O But the number i counted is with the maximum LODS and a worse case scenario.

This is counting everything including props and such. The only thing i didn't include is the polygon count of the “ground”

EDIT: is polygon count measured by:

Number of polygons on screen x fps?

I'm just very confused,

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/nvidia-rtx-series-3x-faster-in-mesh-shading-in-vulkan-rtx2080-handles-20-billion-triangles-second/​

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25z8pm/eli5_how_do_video_game_graphics_get_better_over/​

Or are these just theoretical numbers?

All units except their bodies are counted in my calculations ?

What about the 2 links i posted?, are they just theoretical? or is it proof that my modding idea might work?

Ultimate Battle Simulator 2 can do 1 million characters on screen, they claim.

Drone Swarm can do 32k.

It really and mostly depends on which game you want to mod, but you can assume: You can't do much more than the original game has shown. Most games don't try to push such numbers insanely high, because increasing numbers means compromises, and does not guarantee to increase the fun.

ok so not counting dead bodies that lie around for a while nor props or buildings/turrets. Only “Alive units”.

It's about 2800, about 80 of those 2800 are individual units. The rest are split into “squads of 3x3” units. 200 of those 2800 are grouped into 20 squads of 5 units in each.

So 80 are individual units

200 are 20x5 squads

2520 are 3x3 squads

What should i do about the 2 links i posted that mention high polygon counts. Ill summarize them here:

Link 1 (dunno which software):

In a particular scene that has 100 Happy Buddhas (1 Buddha is 1.087 million triangles) traditional raster takes 17.2 ms on a non-Ti RTX2080. The RTX code from his stream though, with some performance fixes and tweaks, renders the same scene in 6.3 ms which is almost 3X faster.

Link 2:

The Radeon HD 7850 in the PlayStation 4, a mid-range gaming graphics card today, is capable of processing about 27 billion pixels per second and about 55 billion polygons per second. The GeForce 7800 in the PlayStation 3 could handle about 6 billion pixels and 8 billion polygons- quite a large difference.

Also which objects to i need to multiply by 60 (fps)?