| Mazty said:
The thing is having a high polycount isn't always a good thing. For example it's been a widely used trick for years now that in 3ds max (a professional 3d render program) that you only have as many polygons as is required. For example, the lecture I saw stated that there is no point in having a 1000 polygon teapot, and one that is made up of only 30 if the viewing distance is greater then 20 meters as you won't be able to perceive the difference. Therefore many scenes are rendered with the optimal amount of polygons in hollywood animation as this saves on time (and therefore cost) and the end result is not percievably different. Tesselation simply does this on the fly. Gunning for high polycount regardless of the scene isn't a goal anyone should, or actually does, aim for. I think you need to step back and ask just how many polygons you actually want to see. The fact that particle effects (not polygons I know) are reaching over 1 million particles, while having tesselation available, really is quite remarkable: How many triangles is that? Same with this one:
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as I said Tesselation is much more flexable and often a far better answer than just having super complex models. It's more the technological "cool factor" that makes me want to see a native million+ poly character model in an actual game rather than a practical need for that level of detail.
As for your examples I would say the predator is probably in the region of 30-50k polys and the Alien is around 200k, at a guess.
Edit: Ok found a source http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/03/21/aliens_vs_predator_gameplay_performance_iq/8 Xenomorphs are 18k poly models and have a tessellation factor of up to 10 so around 180k.
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