I guess you might need all those polygons if it was strip poker

If your geometry is static, a GF2 GTS/Pro/Ultra should be able to handle > 100,000 polygons at well over 30 fps. I''ve pushed my GF2 over 9 million tris/sec. If you have lots of dynamic geometry and you are writing a lot of vertices into VBs every frame, you''ll be limited to around 20,000 - 30,000 polygons.

Remember static/dynamic doesn''t relate to movement, but to whether you need to re-write the data every frame. Movement should almost always be performed with matrices.

General speed advice - use Vertex Buffers, use triangle strips, support hardware vertex processing, put your VBs in vram, batch send your polys by texture, use as few DrawPrimitive/DrawIndexedPrimitive calls as you can, make sure you are drawing at least a few thousand triangles per call if possible.

Also special effects like multi-texturing, environmental mapping, bump mapping, fog etc are all slow.

Lastly *make sure* you are using mip-mapping (very important).

Well, nVidia publishes demos that render 100k poly models at well over 30 fps on my GF2MX. Perhaps that''s something to look into...

Thanks for all the suggestions. About the design of the games and why all the polys, its really not up to me. Like i said i''m working on contract. All lot of the info isn''t static as all the characters are animated. I guess the best thing for me to do would be to use somekind of LOD approach. I''ll look in to mipmapping as well.