I am wondering what kind of optimizations I should be making to my OpenGL game. It would be a third person fantasy role playing game with massive effects. What is the “standard” level of today’s computer equipment and how should I optimize my game apart from providing a config utility ?
Like Bob says, you want to minimize the amount of triangles you send to a card. There are lots of ways to do this - octrees, BSP’s, PVS, LOD to name a few. Depends on your game - indoors, outdoors, complexity and so on.
If you want to get into cool effects, you’ll find a lot of users here program using extensions. This isn’t very portable but it’s fun! I would say that if you want to maximize your user base, you’d have to program no lower than to the equivalent of a TNT2 these days. Most of us would program to the GeForce family though.