> ...until you walk past a light source. Ah, the wonders of per-polygon 
> lighting calculations. :-P

I thought all games used per-pixel lighting now?

> I don't even want to *know* how much disk space that eats, do I?

I fired up Blender and applied sub-surface to the Monkey mesh to 6 levels 
(it seems that's the maximum allowed).  That gave me 2 million "faces" (4 
million triangles I assume).  I made a copy of it, so there were 8 million 
triangles being displayed.  Blender told me it was taking up 372 MB and I 
could still navigate around the scene in real-time (maybe around 5 fps).

It seems the best nVidia cards (eg GTX 295) have a graphics bandwidth of 
almost 20x what I have and 4x as much RAM, so I suspect you'd be able to 
edit and work on well over 20 million triangles with no problem on a 
high-spec machine.

> (Nor how long it took some poor soul to manually place 7.3 million 
> triangles by hand...)

LOL, for the 5325th time, nobody manually places the triangles by hand, they 
are calculated automatically by the computer using a subdivision algorithm. 
Here is an example of the base mesh that was actually drawn by hand:

http://tinyurl.com/yavvpgx

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