John Carmack on DOOM3 rendering

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It appears the models are low in poly count. Knowing what I know, it would appear that the reason for this, specifically with regards to your engine, is because of the shadow volume based lighting. With higher poly counts, your engine's speed would suffer. Am I correct? And how would ATI's TruForm look?

The game characters are between 2000 and 6000 polygons. Some of the heads do look a little angular in tight zooms, so we may use some custom models for cinematic scenes.

Curving up the models with more polygons has a basically linear effect on performance, but making very jagged models with lots of little polygonal points would create far more silhouette edges, which could cause a disproportionate slowdown during rendering when they get close.

TruForm is not an option, because the calculated shadow silhouettes would no longer be correct.