Happenings: GameCubera

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Hey, I needed another picture to make the top a little less text heavy.

   The numbers I usually hear for the number of polygons N64 could handle range from about 100,000 to 160,000. Recently, good ol' IGNCube had a story where they mention some information straight out of a Nintendo hardware overview. While some of the numbers shown were in the 25 to 40 million polygons per second range, these didn't take into account too many effects, which the GameCube is supposed to be big on. Taking that into account, info on EA's benchmarks, and generally paying attention for the last few years, saying that games with a good number of textures, lights, and effects going might range from 10 million to 16 million isn't too hard to imagine. At least it's somewhat close and easy numbers to work with.

   So divide 10 to 16 million by 100 to 160 thousand, and you come up with the number 100; under those circumstances, GameCube can do about 100 times as many polygons as N64 per second. Nice even number. Now I start to chop away, har har.

   Overall, games in this next generation of systems will be expected to have a lot better frame rate. Not all of them reach 60 (which is the max most TVs can do), but most do, or are at least better than the average game from the last bunch of systems. So let's say most N64 games' GCN counterpart will have a framerate double that of the original. 30 was pretty standard with N64, so games around there should hit around 60; nice. And even if a game had a pretty poor frame rate of, say, 15-20 fps, as you'd likely see if playing a Rare and/or 4-player game, that doubled would be 30-40, which is still above N64 average. So if the system can do 100 times as many polygons overall, but has to do twice as many frames, that knocks things down to 50x as many polygons per frame.

M M M M M

M A A A A

M A R R R

M A R I I

M A R I O

25x Mario?

   I'm not quite done yet. I'll knock it down again by half. Why? Well... miscellaneous. Maybe increasing the distance you can actually see in games, more characters on screen, bit of extra frame rate, things of that sort. And I just like to be on the low side when estimating, so as not to end up with unreasonably high numbers. So since it was 50x before, and now I've somehow got twice as much going on again, that means each individual object on screen could have 25x as many polygons in it as its N64 counterpart. Now where does that leave us? Well, with plenty.

   The simplest full shape possible in 3D is a pyramid, with 4 polygons. If you wanted it really snazzed up on GCN-under-Josh-conditions, it could have 100.

   The Mario model in Super Mario 64 is oft said to be somewhere around 700 polygons. Multiply that by 25, and the GCN-under-Josh-conditions version of Mario is over 17000 polygons.

   How does this compare to other games? Well, according to C&VG;, "The new PS2 Lara has over 5,000 polygons on her body, as opposed to the 500 of the PlayStation version." So yes, it's a fact: Mario could be more than 3 times as curvaceous as Lara Croft. Take that as you will.

   Square's The Bouncer is considered to be one of the PlayStation 2's best looking games. According to IGNPS2, "In the end one character in Bouncer is composed of 2000 to 2500 polygons. This compares to the team's experience with the PSX, where they were able to construct characters of between 400 and 800 polygons." However, it does mention that at some points higher-model characters are used, and "It seems that some characters have their high polygon model composed of 10,000 polygons."

   Videogames.com claims the arcade/Dreamcast versions of Mortal Kombat 4 use 3000 polygons per character. This seems like a sort of mid-way step from N64 to GCN-under-Josh-conditions Mario, being ~5x N64 Mario and ~1/5x GCN-u-J-c Mario.

   Of course, Dreamcast and PS2 games still look great as well, and XBox's look will probably be in the same range as GameCube's. Not saying they're bad. Just saying that even under harsh conditions, there's no need to worry about our kiddy purple $199 lunch box not keeping up with the competition.

But where's the M, C, and A?

March 22, 2001