Even if i come from the lowspec game dev side(wii&ds), i just can underline kevin johnstone's post. Of course you shouldn't waste polys on senseless edge loops and details, but it's the shaders and sfx, who send your performance to stop motion. To get our games on wii running 60fps our bootleneck is the shaders, which need to be simplified here an there. The vertex count is just a base issue and something comperable easy to optimize.

In his article, Guillaume Provost suggested that before optimizing, first it should be determined whether the mesh is transform or fill bound. Question: How does one estimate the transform and fill cost of a mesh? Are there any tools, scripts or plugins for this purpose?

Greetings. I'm a 3d modeller/level designer/game designer person, aspiring to be one of the above. I just want to make games, in general, so I'm interested in learning all associated trades.

Hence why I decided to become part of this community, where I hope to learn lots of new things, ask for, and in time, give advice.