2000 Tris for a crate? This is more than my characters have.
For reference, I think the Unreal2 primary crate had 500 tris...
For reference, I think the Unreal2 primary crate had 500 tris...
Current Triple-A games have easily 5000+ polygons for main characters (even DOOM3 with it's normal maps), and rendering single surface objects that have below ~2K triangles with current mid- to high-end cards just leave the card idle - it's just as fast to draw 200 polygon object than 2000 polygon one. Of course total amount of polygons (vertices) in the scene to be rendered do count because VRAM has to store those too in addition to the screen buffers and textures. But 2K crate is reasonable IMO if you don't have huge warehouse full of them.
My crate has exactly 600 tris - and it has separate lid/top and full interior, is fully beveled, and has been *very well* UV-mapped. I designed this for (my) game use so I tried to shave off every extra polygon and try to make it look more complex with good texture map(s).