In response to Eric's blog

I just read eric's blog (just below this one in the list I guess) about multi-core processors. I completely concur with his appraisal of the issues, however I do feel that multi-core is something useful to me (I can see cases where I'd like to seperate out tasks across seperate CPU cores).

But it made me recall something I sent to someone on IRC the other night.

I don't want to steal bandwidth off of NVIDIA or take these things out of context, so I'll post the full URL here and then link the individual images.

developer.nvidia.com/object/nvperfhud-screenshots.html

This is nvidia's screenshots page showing various games profiling in progress. Lets look at a couple of those games though. What you are looking for, is the top left hand of these images, the poly's per frame and frames per second.

Lets start first with BF2142..



A relatively simple scene, but look at those all important figures.. 250,046 triangles at 61 fps

That game is what you could consider "current tech" I think? Maybe in between current and next gen?

Lets look at a couple of other games in the same boat. Here's Company of Heroes



The stats here are 113,643 triangles at a shader under 60 fps.

So the current gen is somewhere between 100 and 250(ish) thousand poly's per frame at around 60 frames per second (thats not to say they couldnt go higher, they might be frame locked).

Lets have a peek at slightly older generations. Here's World of Warcraft.



The stats for WOW are 111994 triangles at 66 fps. Not bad at all. Of course its not shader bound and everything is reasonbly simple to render, so I'm not surprised its doing ok.

So what do you think "next gen" is going to mean in terms of these stats?

Well, the settlers 6 shot is kind of suggesting where we're going next.



Stats: 1,557,072 triangles at 26 fps.

Yes, thats right. ONE AND A HALF MILLION triangles. At roughly 30 frames per second. At a conservative guesstimate, I'd suggest that trimming that back to around 1 million triangles and sorting out your batching will give you 60 fps.

Thats a FOURFOLD increase on a game that was released THIS YEAR.

What do all these figures mean? Well, I think for us indies, it doesnt really mean an awful lot particularly, but it does *suggest* that with that order of power and further increases in power on a similar timeframe it does open up possibilities for games that werent available before.

The downside to the potential for new avenues, is the technology costs involved.

But I do feel that we shouldnt be scared off technology in much the same way we shouldnt be too enamoured of it either. I fully support the idea of doing teeny tiny 2D games on low end crappy hardware, but I also support the idea of doing truly groundbreaking games on stupidly high-end hardware too.

Thats not to say go up against EA etc. But more to explore the possibility space of this new technology. What does it enable? Is there a leap to be made much like the leap John Carmack made with his first implementation of hardware scrolling in commander keen, or his move into raycast rendering with wolfenstien.

We have some new hardware frontiers and we can choose to explore those frontiers as much as we can choose to stay at home and refine what we already understand.