That's strange. My old geforce 2 runs a blitz3D app at well over 40 FPS (which is good for a geforce 2) while drawing 6000 individual entities
Are they copied entities? Same mesh? Same textures? Are they all running collisions? What kind of interactivity is there? Additionally, 40 FPS ins't a lot.
Colling and LOD I have done many times with extremely good results, I've even had about 1000 * 1000 poly models (all on the screen at the same time) in a scene at >70 FPS (using my LOD system along with my polygon reduction algorithm) with nearly no visible quality loss.
Were they different meshes? Were they animated?
Maybe it's just me, but I have never seen shadows, commercial or otherwise, that have not slowed down the game very considerably. If you want shadows, buy sswift's shadow system. It's fast and works well.
Yes, shadows slow any game down ... to a degree. We used Sswift's system already ... and it's not useful beyond a few entities on low detail environments ... depending on CPU of course.
No doubt Blitz3D does have it's limitations, although I simply disagree that it absolutely could not be used to produce a commercial quality game.
Commercial just means you sell it.
Sure, Blitz does that everyday. However, you're not going to go toe to toe with the best tools and games out there at all. In a lot of the current tools out there things that you have to work around in Blitz are completely abstracted out of the picture letting you focus on the game at hand.
We've made fun games with Blitz and we still are. Bottomline though is that it's only got so much steam ... and it's not enough to compete beyond a certain level.