Is polygon count no longer important?

Is polygon count no longer important? Everyone talks about resolution and textures, but polygons are the most important asset of 3D graphics. The more polygons you have, the more detailed your game will be. No one ever says how many polygons these new systems can produce.

Polygons took a backseat when gears of war came out. Still, there's a lot of nasty low poly stuff in 7th generation games, like minor environment details and npc's that'll be ironed out this gen. Plus, the more polygons a gpu can push, the less lod pop in, which is another area that can be greatly improved this gen.

poly's are still important all around.

diminishing returns

Polygon count was never informative. There were a lot of polygon numbers thrown around in the PS1/Saturn/N64 era, but they didn't tell us much. Here is a passage which explains why (written by a guy who was clearly a fan of Sega, but his tech talk meshes with what I've seen and read over the years).

http://www.gamepilgrimage.com/SATPScompare.htm

Another popular theory on why the Saturn failed to capture the masses' interests is that it didn't have comparable 3D performance to the PS1. The Saturn, is significantly more powerful than the PS1 in 2D capabilities, but it is also able to run at higher resolutions (640x224, 704x480), and capable of higher resolution and color count textures with less effort. The Saturn is more capable of these things because it has 66% more Video RAM. On the Saturn, as is true on any hardware, more RAM allows for higher color, higher resolution texture mapping, and higher screen resolution. Combine this with the specs directly from Sega and Sony's web pages, showing that both systems were capable of similar polygon performance, shows clearly that the Saturn was no slouch in the 3D department either.

The catch is that Sega achieved comparable polygonal performance with the Saturn by including more processors in the Saturn, which made development more difficult at first than it would be on the more simple PS1. In addition to having better developer support from Sony than Sega gave for the Saturn, and better more mature development kits, the PS1 also had built in special effects in the form of transparency and gouraud shading. This allowed the PS1 to generate lightsourcing and transparent special effects or polygons with a minimum hit to the system's polygon performance. Since the Saturn had to generate these effects through sheer processing muscle, developers of Saturn games usually had to lower the resolution to 320x224 in order to program effects similar to those on the Playstation. What this all means is that because the PS1 could just "turn on" light sourcing and transparency, the effects were achieved with uniform results across any game that used them, while the same effects on the Saturn were subject to the quality of the code, written by each individual developer, to display it.

@CarnageHeart:

Sony were known for over-hyping their polygon performances through the roof. While Sega and Nintendo always gave realistic performance figures, Sony always gave over-exaggerated performance figures, misleading the public into believing their consoles are more powerful than they actually were.

Anyway, that's a pretty good site. I've seen a lot of their retro comparisons before. It's almost like a Digital Foundry for retro games.

Companies cannot fool consumers about the power of their hardware once the games are shown.

In terms of polygonal games the PS1 started ahead of the Saturn and eventually pulled waaaay ahead (Sega dropped the Saturn in its third year IIRC).

I think the three biggest reasons were that the Saturn was exponentially harder to program for, there wasn't nearly as much talent trying to massage extra performance from the Saturn and the Saturn didn't live nearly as long (Sega abandoned it after a few years).

Exactly. The Saturn wasn't weaker in 3D, but just too difficult to work with. Even Sega AM2's Yu Suzuki, the leading 3D game designer at the time (known for producing the best 3D graphics in arcades), complained that the Saturn was difficult to work with.

The problem was that Sega kept getting scared and abandoning the consoles too early. Sony on the other hand stuck to their guns when it came to the consoles and games. Sega Saturn as with PS3 had potential and needed devs with patience. It seems back then devs weren't as patient as they seem to be today.

In case you haven't noticed. Gamers are colossol morons. Non-of these things they talk are actually important to them because really.. In essence... Bragging about their toys is more important to them. Resolution and Framerate is just the tool they use.

Along those lines, what really hurt Sega with the Genesis (and what might hurt Sony with Morpheus) is the fact that they distracted themselves by supporting peripherals (nods towards the Sega CD and to a much lesser extent the 32X) while Nintendo wisely focused on the SNES itself. I don't think its coincidence that while the Genesis had an early lead, down the line the SNES pulled ahead.

Its worth keeping in mind that in the Saturn/PS1 days multiplatform games were uncommon so being the third bestselling system was a much worse place to be.

It is important . More polygons = More Realistic Looking objects . Sadly most people these days , fight over resolutions and particle effects in so called next gen games but doesn't notice crappy textures and low poly character models .

The widespread use of detailed texture maps in games has become the primary method of adding detail into characters. This is different from the 32-bit era when you normally had to physically model a detail for it to show up.

Great art design and artwork does wonders.

OOOO. David Cage would love this thread.

@magicalclick: As for resolution and texture, nah, that's just something people want to brag about.

You had me until this part. Textures matter

This is your basic steel axe from Skyrim with a new set of textures. Nothing else has been changed. Certainly there are other things that your GPU is doing to really bring out the beauty of this new texture...but you still need the textures to make this happen. There's no amount of technically finagling you can do to make up for shitty art.