AAA Game Release Poly Counts

Since the book I got out from the library were a little dated in terms of how much game graphics have progressed since 2012 (when the book was published) I wanted to look into what the poly counts where like in some of the new release games. More importantly I needed to know what the maximum polys a PS4/Xbox One or a middle of the range PC can process at one time. However, after many different searches on google, I couldn't seem to find anything I thought was credible that would specifically state the poly count except one article -

inFAMOUS: Second Son’s Characters are 120,000 Polygons; 11 Million Rendered Regularly by the Engine

We already talked about Adian Bentley’s inFAMOUS: Second Son Engine Postmortem talk at the Games Developers Conference, but a new version of the slides published today had some additional ones that included some very interesting information about the impressive rendering capabilities of the game’s engine.

• The engine streams environment blocks on a 100 meters grid. Each block loads 33 MiB (Mebibytes, basically a techie version of a megabyte) of data including everything (physics, scripts, AI and particle). Below you can see a visual representation of those blocks.
• Only 10 blocks are displayed at any given time. An extra 7 are loaded but not rendered to help with I/O (input/output speed) from the hard disk.
• 4 blocks are rendered with 48 MiB high resolution texture packs that are streamed separately.
• Each object has between 1 and 3 LODs (levels of detail based on distance) for near to mid distances.
• FAR LOD uses baked imposters.
• The engine regularly draws over 11 million polygons for the whole scene.
• There are many instances per block, with over three million instance vertices per block.
• In the worst case the player can move 20 meters per seconds before overtaking the speed at which the world can be rendered.

In the picture above you can see how the streaming of the environmental assets works. The green squares are the blocks that are loaded and rendered, the yellow ones are loaded in memory, but not rendered yet. The little green squares on the lower right indicate blocks where high resolution textures are loaded.

• Each character has between 300-500 separate bones, many of which for the face, cloth and hands.
• Characters have 120.000 polygons, but NPCs have more LODs (lower detail models displayed when far away from the camera) for performance reasons.
• They take 28 MiB of data, most of which are textures.
• There are thousands of animation clips, and facial animation during cutscenes is done separately for each vertex.
• Vertex animation is done with three bits per vertex, while wrinkles are procedural.

Those are definitely impressive numbers, and the results definitely show in the game, making inFAMOUS: Second Son one of the most beautiful next generation games on the shelves. Considering that Sucker Punch managed to achieve this kind of results at the very beginning of a generation, it’s hard not to be excited about what they’ll do next.

http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/04/14/infamous-second-sons-characters-are-120000-polygons-11-million-rendered-regularly-by-the-engine/

Here is one article I found comparing the PS4 and Xbox One on their processing power but I have no idea how this would transfer into polygon count at all.

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-vs-xbox-720-which-is-better-1127315/2