Why are shells and bullets so detailed?

Tank shells are so small and infrequent that they would almost never cause an issue.

Do you actually have shots of detailed bullets? The fastest firing LMG only shoots 12.5 bullets a second, which will probably impact in less than 2 seconds, so that's 25 bullets per player times 200 players is 500 bullets onscreen if you somehow gathered 100 players from each side and had them fire all at once in a location where you could actually see every bullet. Impossibly unlikely during actual play.

I would think the sheer amount of combat events happening in a massive game (and all the tricks needed to make things feel and play right) would be one of the biggest factors. But it's all just guesswork without having access to their performance profiler tools. In some games I've worked on (Mechwarrior 4) the audio was surprisingly the thing eating up too much memory and causing perf issues and when we implemented lower-quality stuff things played much better, so it's not always an easy thing to guess at.

Lowering the detail of something that already has very few vertices and a small image for its texture would be pointless. The processing power required to render a static object with no animations or bones that is moving in a straight line (or arc) is extremely minimal. You could have thousands of them on the screen with very little impact on performance. The reason being is that all the work on the CPU is already being done (logical calculations, position, vector, etc) and this game is almost always CPU bound.

Its not really that surprising. Audio is actually quite resource intensive and it is hard to optimize. You generally have to optimize how its played since lowering the quality of an audio file is very noticeable to the human ear. Still, humans generally find it surprising that audio is resource intensive because we rely more on our eyes than ears.

They are less frequent than infantry, but in large battles with multiple tanks all shelling, that is still a lot of shelling.

I've noticed these detailed tanks shells before, too (not the logo. No way you'd ever see that in real time), but to me, they always looked like 2D sprites, or maybe I just assumed that's what they were. These would be easier to render than 3d tank shells, and who knows, maybe the extra detail on the shells doesn't really take any extra computing power. If these were a noticeable drain on FPS, I think the devs would be smart enough to simplify them. They've made mistakes, but they're not idiots.

I understand why people would be concerned about this but lets be honest. How many people have their framerate drop to unplayable levels due to GPU bottlenecks? This game is CPU intensive and I don't think detail on bullets and shells will make a difference rather than the bullets and shells themselves.

If they do simplify them I hope that we have an option to enable or disable the simpler model. I know it seems silly for just a tank round but it all adds up. For example they already removed Motion Blur for everyone.
Is there a reason that they removed features for everyone, even if it didn't effect good P.C.'s?

I have heard Phoenix rounds look like an Screeching Red-White-And-Blue Eagle.

who fired that shell? I'm looking at it's travel direction (if the way it's facing is any indication) and there's no Lightning in that direction.... or any vehicle or player

I'd like to say 'Thats Planetside 2 for you' but I'd be lying. There was a Lightning or something on the hill down from TI Alloys, it was none of the visible armour.

Unless of course someone else shot that shell and its actually spinning wildly out of control Don't get me started on detailed spinning shells, my head will explode.

i dont understand how projectiles (that you actually never get to see) are so detailed while ground and building textures (that you see everywhere everytime) are so washed out

hmm, to me the shell looks like it could be done with only a few polygones, and some simple textures on it that makes it look round...

For as much as I know, polygons per se are not expensive, but shading and lighting them is. I hope they are not using the full lighting algorythms with them.

Yeah but it's completely trivial compared with the number of polies used by the tanks themselves (let alone all the other stuff out there.)

A tank entering your visual range adds a good chunk of poly count to what you're rendering, while the projectile is a tiny fraction of that tank's polies (and only active about half the time, due to the projectile living perhaps half as long as the reload.)

You could make it a simple cone/pyramid-like-shape and no one would notice. A detailed model like shown in the screenshot is a waste of processing power.

Sure - in static screenshots that are lucky to be captured. You never see things looking this detailed or cool in game because it all happens so fast.

Where detail and coolness really matters, which would be on facility, vehicle and weapon models / textures, the quality is nowhere near the same.

Raven and phoenix missiles look like a rocket without fins and is pinched in the middle. There was a bug time ago that could cause such missiles to freeze in air, and keep screaming.

It could have the shape and be a solid flat gray texture and because of the speed they move at you'd never notice.

People (myself included) are complaining about this because PS2 is a massive resource hog. Along with it's current memory leaks things like highly detailed projectile shells are unnecessary and without it could save on the long run of resources needed for this game. With the current state of memory leaks and hitching we could use all the savings we can get.

I have to agree with the OP on this. If these models were used in bases as additional interesting features I could understand it (racks of missiles or shells).

But for something that moves so fast that it is on your screen for a fraction of a second (a couple of frames at best) - you'll never get to see the detail in any meaningful sense (especially if you have motion blur turned on). The only people this benefits are those who take screenshots like the one in the OP.

Given the performance issue in this game - projectiles like this should IMO be the most basic shape they can be and have nothing but rudimentary detail/texture. In large battles with a lot of tanks all firing at the same time - it can't be good for performance to have all this extra geometry flying around. I'd rather the resources be used to run the game faster/smoother or increase the detail on things that can be seen.

"Oh hey, you're in 96+ battle, so infantry render range is reduced to 15m because of performance reasons. But man...look at those detailed shells!"
-SOE