So somebody just told me that Unity allocates 1000 triangles for every object, so it doesn’t make any difference if the object is 100 polys or 800 polys.
If that’s the case is there any more to it? It just seems really odd to me since my idea of game models has always been to make them as low poly as possible while retaining the wanted detail. It may mean changing my whole modeling method.
This is not true.
graphics cards are highly parallel now so setting up a mesh takes some significant overhead compared to just pushing the vertices through. In the old days we might have to upload geometry every frame over PCI or AGP, but now with VBOs etc the geometry is cached on the GPU.
So these days optimization is more about reducing your passes and separate meshes / material setups as opposed to poly count alone.