So... just how high can the polycount go?

[thelegend]

Too bad, looks like thelegend has to remake his Tatooine at War map now

Because of...? I just used Assets which have been shared here. While making this Map Battlefront (EA) had not been released yet.

[ZoomV]

Let's remember that if the whole map were filled with 30k poly models there WOULD be slowdown. There's a good chance of things crashing as well, since at some point you're going to hit hard-coded safety limits within the game engine itself. And also remember the community has been kept alive in some small part given that this still runs great on older machines. Not everyone has quad core CPUs and whatnot.

I can confirm that high poly will hit limits. I tried replacing all the sniper rifles in Torfront with the recently released swbf3 weapon models and almost instantly started seeing intermittent crashes on the Belsavis map with symptoms consistent to a render overload. Although it is worth noting that Belsavis was running just under those limits before I put in the high-poly rifles.

Although anecdotally I do believe that texture resolutions have a bigger impact on that limit than poly counts.


I'm also going to agree that leet poly counts don't matter much. Not just because of engine limits, but because most of what makes models look good is lighting and environment not raw poly count or texture resolution. GAB's Kothlis is a good example of this.