Howdy!
Any nice and easy way to get a polygon count of any asset models you acquire? I need to keep them low. Wish it was just shown in the editor or something? Old Blender version? Open each of them one by one to check?! Any chance their file size relates to mesh count?

There isn't a way to do this in Game Guru itself, you will need to open each model individually in a 3D modelling program like Blender to both find out what the polycount is, and potentially reduce it. Some 3D modelling programs have tools to reduce polycount; Blender has modifiers that do this (decimate I think is one), Milkshape has a simple DirectX mesh tool with a simple slider you can pull down to lower your polycount, and there are also dedicated tools out there like MeshLab that have multiple tools to reduce polycount.

Yes, the filesize does relate to the polycount, but so too does animation. Models with animation are a little bit larger than models without.

Overall though, it should be noted that meshes themselves are relatively cheap memory-wise compared to textures. You're way more likely to run out of VRAM with your textures than with your models.

EDIT: For reference, a single 512 x 512 texture (with no alpha channel) takes up as much memory as a 16K poly mesh.

AE

as a rule of thumb yes, if they are the same format then bigger file size will mean more polys as you are mainly really saving vertex data (i.e. where each of the points are that make up each face/tri)
though if you are saving animations as well will be much larger file size

Anyway, sometimes you'll have to determine what's is the most accurate in specific cases.
Ie. a brick damaged/old wall being lowpoly most likely rely on texture to get the damage/old effect, this means a high res texture, and this means more ram waste, so here is when you have to determine what's is most accurate in this case, lowpoly or high res texture?

And yes, I know there are other ways to do so, lowpoly and low res texture, but the achieved effect is not the same.

Thanks for all your info!
My intention for poly count reduction is not for memory (at least not yet! - maybe later?)
but is for trying to keep FPS speed up to a healthy amount.
I now have a GTX 1650 - obviously (budg--et!) but when looking at a large group of objects,
the frame rate drops ~ 30-40% Basically from high 50's to low 30's.
And currently no animated -- but useful info for going forward.

Ah, but are they textured? Because 97% of your GPU's load is spent on texture memory and that's what's likely to be pulling your framerate down. That's why I say a poly count reduction is unlikely to make much difference.

I have a GTX 1050ti (4GB) and I can comfortably run a scene with 1 million polygons in Game Guru. You know how much of that 4GB VRAM those 1 million polygons take up? 45.7MB. A single 4K texture uses more than that!

AE

In the past I didn’t use to bother with LOD on models but I was way wrong to do so. Adding LOD greatly increased FPS without impacting memory as AE says.

Would be nice GGMax to generate LOD automagically when in the "converting mesh" process.