HappySqurriel on 26 December 2012
I actually remember creating mods for the original Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 where your goal was to try to keep polygon counts as far below 1,000 polygons for a character as possible. This was always a challenge because you wanted to eliminate "waste" polygons.
With that in mind, I suspect that most of the polygons in modern games are "waste" polygons and could probably be eliminated from the base model and recreated using tessellation as needed on new hardware.
