edit - title fail, should say "polygons per car" of course.

Many people are talking about Forza 3 having 1 million polygons per car... is this really possible?

It's widely spread information that 360's GPU can do 500 million polygons per second (which is not gonna happen in practice since you need to use some of the shading units for pixels, they won't all be doing polygons).

At 60 frames per second, that's an absolute maximum of 8 million polygons per frame, which means the game would only be able to display 8 cars per frame, before accounting for environments or pixel shading.

My point? Stop hyping the game on the basis of performance numbers put out by developers, the game looks great no matter the amount of polygons. As for GT5 vs Forza 3 comparisons, wait for the games to come out because until then all we have are potentially manipulated screenshots and trailers.

People need to stop worrying too much about polygons and the like...good graphics are nice to look at, but seriously...some people treat it as the only important thing. Also...what's the deal with all these new threads like (FORZA 3 graphics king and similar)

I agree. It's ridiculous.

finally some facts that may put this thing to an end

I'm not sure on the whole 1 million polygons per car thing, as I have only heard it from other people, but I would guess that a lot of heavy optimisation goes into displaying the game. In most games, the further away an object gets from the camera, the less detail needs to be displayed. Developers will deform the models and reduce the poly count the further away an object is, whilst making sure there is no noticable drop in quality. Models can therefore be changed to have half, a quarter or even less the polygons than the original based on distance. For some closeups like viewing the Model while tuning, or getting that view of the car wheel at the start of a race, it probably has the full 1 million (if that is correct) as its viewing only a section of the full model... but certainly when racing, the figure for each car would be well below that figure. The type of optimisations would happen in GT5 as well...

It might be 1 million polygons before they put a normal map on it...

But then we're probably comparing apples and oranges when we compare that numbers with the ones for Forza 2 and GT5.

I agree, I'm just thinking maybe that's what people are talking about because 1 million seems like a lot for a single object.

Both GT5 and F3 look great, I honestly can't see the graphical difference between all the screenshots.
Graphically they're both at the same level, only someone with an eagle eye vision could see the difference and I doubt anyone has that good eye sight.

For me it's all up to which game has better performance and more cars that I will think is better. Also GT5's 16 cars race sounds really tasty compared to 8 cars of F3. I have high hopes that GT5 will deliver like it allways does.

i see nothin wrong with hyping the game early now a days.