1. It depends upon if you are using vertice effects in any way. Lighting (especially specular) requires an even polygon distribution, mesh deformation effects like twisting your model on bullet impacts also look better when there are more vertices to work with.
2. Why go low poly if you are throwing a big texture at it? On most GPU's you will loose far more time rendering a detailed texture than you do rendering polygons.
I've found in B3D that secondary textures are very quick. However I had problems on my last card (GeForce 2 GTS) when I used a 3rd texture layer as the card natively only supported 2 layers (but 8 according to the drivers... hense problems.
2. Why go low poly if you are throwing a big texture at it? On most GPU's you will loose far more time rendering a detailed texture than you do rendering polygons.
I've found in B3D that secondary textures are very quick. However I had problems on my last card (GeForce 2 GTS) when I used a 3rd texture layer as the card natively only supported 2 layers (but 8 according to the drivers... hense problems.