a lot dpends on the CPU and video card you are targeting and what kinds of optimizations your doing. Aerial Antics could only push 11,000 polys befor ewe started experimenting with optimizations, ended up with about 40,000 and dynamic shadows. but how many surfaces and shadow polys you can push seems to depend to some degree on your CPU, and wether you want the game to run on older cards pre geforce 1.