(3dsmax 7) How many polys can you have on-screen without slowing down?

[Pawz]

I've got a slight problem that.. I'm not quite sure IS a problem.

I got a new video card and I figured Max *might* be a bit faster.. but instead I've noticed that any scene with 20,000+ polygons just chugs like mad.

Is this normal or is there something screwy with my system?

I'm running a P4 2.4ghz, 1 gig RAM, Geforce 6600 GT .. Someone else to benchmark against would be great.

thanks.

EDIT - Ok, maybe it's just the # of objects in the scene. 5,000 boxes make my scene chug like mad (20,000 polys).. but 500 spheres x 100 segments (500,000 polys) is handled alright. Odd.

[Mr. Bluesummers-3DT]

My computer can throw around roughly that many polygons before starting to slow down, but I'm running an old GeForce 2 ultra 64 card. The poor thing's five years old, so I'm surprised yours is running so slowly. Find out about your display settings in Max and try mucking with those. I remember switching from OpenGL to DirectX or vice versa and getting better results for some reason. The thing was that my computer would CRASH with ~100,000 polys instead of just slow down. Consider changing modes to see which works better- your computer should handle more.

[DeadlyFreeze]

Well think of it this way. Your scene might be counting 500,000 polys but your actual viewport is only displaying less then quarter of those faces. Everything else is being clipped by objects in front of it.

When you sub-d a mesh down to 25,000 polys but there is nothing to block it you get more notable lag.