You Require More Polygons

The amount of polygons, or tris, whatever you prefer, is constantly increasing every year. Seeing as computer technology gets outdated almost every six months its pretty easy to see why. Personally, i feel we are at a peak of graphic realism right now, almost every big game will have the same graphical quality as the others, none really standing out from the rest, although some will be better in some areas depending on the genre of the game.

One game that will raise the bar when it is finally released will be Gran Turismo 5. GT has always been know for its high level of details with the vehicles and now it almost looks perfect, the cars at least :

I read an article recently in a PS3 magazine on the statistics of GT5, and some of the cars consist of up to 500,000 polygons, compared to the original GT, which had 300 polygons for each car. Generally though, the majority of the cars will be about 100,000 polys. Below is a car not created for GT5 but built to the standards and constraints:

Pretty crazy. The reflections are brilliant. What amazes me is that the PS3 will run the game with 16 cars with this many polys and real time rendering at 60fps, which i doubt any computer could do comfortably. In a year or 2 probably.

Of course this doesnt mean you dont have to worry about low poly modelling, this is still a key factor in games, manly to do with levels of detail, the further away you get the less detailed it will be. I think GT4 had 5 levels of detail.

Oh, its a good job the ps3 uses bluray because at the moment GT5 is 140GB in size, planned to be released on 3 discs. No wonder its PS3 exclusive, installing it on a PC with dvds would be fun...