About this image

I decided to import the full resolution mesh of the carved necklace I'm currently working on into Skyrim. Why? Because I can, and for the fun of it, and mostly to see how much this Engine can handle in terms of polygons.

The answer is, it can handle a friggin lot. We're talking about almost 100'000 triangles and over 50'000 vertices in a single mesh. There isn't even a normal map on it in this shot. You can see my framerate in the upper left corner, this is on Ultra High ini-settings (custom tweaked), 2k textures in the background (but no ENB), all running on a very dated Radeon 5700.

This should dispell once and for all the myth that anything below 10k polygons has even the slightest impact on performance unless you're playing on a potato. Texture resolution is the real enemy of your framerates. And ENB, of course, depending on which preset you use.

Not that I intend to use the full 100k tri mesh for release, I just wanted to take some pretty screens and haven't gotten the normals baked yet. And I felt the need to share this little experiment.