Quote:Original post by Dunge
If I look fast at GearsOfWars models, a standard locus enemy have between 9k and 13k polys so it's a lot more than your character. Of course, polycount is not the only thing you should worry about when making a game,.. code optimization, shader and post processing and other things are a lot more important for the global FPS. GOW use U3, so they know the engine is good enough to handle it.

Sorry, but comments like these always bother me. Past what geometry culling techniques an engine uses (Octree's, portaling, backface culling...etc), the design is what affects the polycount the most.
Gears of war was made for relatively high-end hardware so they knew they could use more polys, furthermore the worlds are tight, sectioned spaces, so they could get away with a lot more polys per section.
As i have said in the past, polygon counts are a thing of balance. What you should do is find the max tri count your minimum target hardware can support, then divvy up those tris into all the assets that may be appearing onscreen at once. But you should, even then, be flexible. The general rule of thumb, the more screenspace the object will be taking up, the more polys and higher resolution textures should be used.

On some of the latest games, the amount of pixel instructions used to render the character's material (e.g. skin, eyes, cloth, metal) can be more important than the number of polys.

Also, there is a trend these days to use normal maps on everything to get more detail - but keep in mind that a 512x512 normal map might use up the same amount of VRAM as ~2500 vertices.

As has been said, it's a balancing act, and it really depends on the specific game's needs.
That said, 3k should be fine ;)