Consoles are holding this game back (graphically)

[Imoen]

I've only just started playing with Blender and I'm seeing a lot of tri used in a lot of game models. I currently have no idea what the difference between Tri and Quad are other than pulling when a lot of corners meet in one spot. Otherwise from what I can tell, is that those are some nice screen grabs. I just wish they could be bigger.

I wanted to get into 1.0 when the PS3 version was released but then 1.0 happened during and after the open beta. Like they assumed an unaltered visually enhanced Skyrim would work if it were modded into a open world mmo. I thought of going with a PC but even talk of top end rigs were struggling from graphical-data overload. It makes sense why they began copy-pasting textures everywhere and why it could never run on a console and barely on the average pc. While I never saw any difference in player and npc models in clips and scenes between 1.0 and 2.0. I cant help but noticing some kind of difference between the way outdoor environments looked or rendered. Like in the first and third x3d jpegs, that's nice scenery. I just wish I could recognize the area that skeleton is in..

Some of it is because of the depth of field, which we don't get except for CS's now and the shaders are different, they switched to deferred shading I believe is what it is for 2.0

1 quad = 2 tri = 4 verts.

Verts can be shared so the number can vary , example : if you have 4 quads arranged in a square shape, 4 quads= 8 tris = 9 verts. Where as if the 4 quads were in a strip/row it would be 4 quads = 8 tris = 10 verts.

Also depending on the engine sometimes it will split edges/verts at UV seams . So the 4 in the shape of a square becomes 4 quads = 8 triangles = 16 verts (Assuming a UV seam and the engine is splitting the verts at every connecting edge.)

Which is why usually I refer to Triangles or Verts when talking optimization. a 'poly' can be multiple triangles or 1 but in the example showed at GDC I assume they mean 'triangle' since in my pot example was 470 quads, which would mean 940 Tris and that is without the caps on the cylinder and just a stupid rough estimate of the foliage by bloating the roundness a bit. So 1k doesn't seem too bad to me for an asset like that, sure you could take it a little lower, but at a certain point it becomes very Jagged since it is a cylinder.

Example of why I hate the term poly. By simply connecting the verts with edges it changes the statistic count of "Poly" so again I assume they are referencing "triangles" since as you can see between the three images - the triangle count doesn't change.







Also in regards to the 1.0 screens. You can right click >view image , to get a better look at them. , it is smaller though because I played a tad lower res for better 3d performance.