This is kind of a tricky question to answer, because I realize that it depends on many factors, including the number of elements on the screen at once and the kind of hardware you're targeting.

But how would you go about determining an acceptable number of polygons for your 3d game characters? What exactly is low poly these days? assuming you're not just targetting the latest greatest 3d cards.

I presume the best method would be to look at what age of hardware. If you're talking about hardware that was hot in 99 then you're talking about around 10,000 polygons per frame, which I believe was what Q3 targetted, 97 hardware would be around 4000 polys per frame at a guess.

So, I'd say upper limits would be 400 polys per character for 97 hardware, 1000 polys per character for 99. Older stuff, 150.

Sometimes it's not just the polycount which matters - for example Blitz3D's performance deeply depends on how many surfaces there are seen: 1 mesh with 300 polys will run faster than 3 meshes with 100 polys each - this is because video card has to load stuff in memory every time it starts texturing another object.

One of our (in-development, check out http://koti.mbnet.fi/morphecy/shredder/shot001.jpg ) game has about 7500 polygons shown and there is about 70 different surfaces on screen and it runs quite smoothly (50FPS) with Pentium 300MHz, GeForce 2 card.

Other game was using lower number of meshes but had about 20000 polys on screen and it run about 30FPS with same specs as above.

[edit]ah, and we use 500-1000 poly characters ;)

Hope this clears even something :D

Well of course the number of textures and so on all matters, but I'm trying to get a feel for where to aim. Does anyone know if there are some kind of statistics available for the % of people using hardware X vs Hardware Y -- I mean if I knew 80% of the market was currently using geforce2 or better then I could at least guage a little how to aim the complexity of the scenes, the poly counts, the size of textures etc...

There are none...
Targetting gf2mx as your min. specs is a good choice from what I know. (enought to make your game look ok and at the same time you don't cut your audience too much).

svero, aim for a GeForce 1 if you want to be sure.
Using a GF with and a P3 450 we aimed for around 5000 polys on screen at once with Tripper & Mutant Storm.

Dont forget, using 3D, theres plenty of scope for graphical options. For example, lowering the particle effects and the background details in Mutant Storm gets it running nice on a P300 with a TNT card.

Do you have any ideas as to the kind of game you have in mind? ( if any )

edit : First person games require more polys to get a polished and proffesional look due to the camera getting pretty damn close to the textures & geometry. However, 3rd person cameras ( as we use ) dont have that issue. Its amazing how good a little 10 poly beastie can look from a distance!

I got this estimation from my graphic artist when I first got into working on my game:

300-600 polys - RTS game chars, Or playstation 1 chars
600-2000 polys - Half Life and Quake 3 characters
2000-10000 polys - considered med poly, for fighting games
where you see 2 chars, or next gen sports titles.

if 300-600 for a char doesnt sound feasable, check my site.
My main character (http://www.gilzu.com/n04.htm) is around 900+- polys, and each of the other characters (http://www.gilzu.com/n07.htm) are around 500+- polys. each looks great BTW.

I keep my entire 3D scene under 2000 polygons. For Best Friends, each character was only 250 triangles. For my next title, the main character is 500, with the two other characters at about 150 polygons each, and they don't look bad to me. Here's a little snapshot of the three, straight from the level editor:
http://download.retro64.com/bf2222/hero_chars.png

From left to right:
500, 150, 150 triangles.

We're keeping stuff to under 5,000 polys to make sure we can run on TNTs and the like at at least 30fps. There's a massive, massive difference in performance when you go to the hardware T&L cards.

Cas :)

For our first game (soon), our charcters range from 150-500. Our main character is only 388 polygons, while a boss model would weigh in at 500-800 polygons. You really don't need that many polygons to get good shapes. It's more important to have high quality textures. For that I contracted out someone and I just stuck with modeling.

John

BongPig's advice regarding graphics options is important. There is no good reason NOT to support hardware as old as TNT-era. You just have an options screen where the player can adjust the graphics complexity and/or turn stuff on/off. Just about any graphical effect should be listed on your options screen: dynamic shadow casting, particles, multitexturing, etc. Older hardware can play the game with all the effects turned off while newer hardware can play the game with everything cranked up.

Oh, and definitely have settings for resolution and color depth; just switching between 1600x1200/32bit to 640x480/16bit goes a LONG way toward scaling the graphical complexity for different hardware. Scalability is one of the big advantages of 3D vs 2D graphics (it is difficult to change resolution for a 2D game, but trivial for a 3D game) so take advantage of that, er, advantage.

That said, you will need to have good default settings since not all players will know to adjust the settings. One approach is to simply use middle of the road settings for default, while the more sophisticated approach is to detect the hardware used and automatically adjust.

The Q3 numbers posted here are almost perfect... nevertheless I need to slap you with mine :>

They aimed for an absolute maxium of 15,000 polys at any give location in the map (r_speeds 1) but it's usually below 10,000.

All models exist in 3 LODs. Highest (r_lodbias 0) is 900-1000. Lowest (r_lodbias 2) is about half of that.

The default configuration is high geometry (almost the highest possible settings - except r_subdivisions wich is set to 4 instead of 1) and low resolution - 640x480 (imo all 3d games should startup with that resolution).

@BongPig

Mutant Storm runs even quite well on my (not primary) K6 300 with 128MB and - behold - a Banshee ;D

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So... I think 5k polys is a save bet and even 7.5k won't hurt that much. Well as usual - it depends. If you have a lot of transparent layers the framerate will drop down to the floor with older cards such as Voodoo2, Banshee, TNT or ATI128.

I think it would be a nice idea to include a benchmark mode wich runs several times with different settings. That should make identifying of the bottlenecks on the various betatesting machines easier.

eg: Lowering the geometry and the framerate doesnt get higher -> graphics card sets the limit. Lowering the resolution (and turning texture effects of) and the framerate doesn't increase -> cpu sets the limit.

This way you should be able to find out what's a good minimum hardware combination for your game.

The Character below is 650 polys. I was going with limitations of hardware from 98 and up in mind. I thought that'd be reasonable.

http://www.dark-shadows.com/dsegames/the.demolitionist/game.spec/images/The.Demolitionist.Tripwire.Renderings.Alternate.jpg