Can anyone tell me how many tris the penelope character has?
Adding her to an otherwise empty scene gives me a tris count of 3.2k, which is pretty extreme for such a simple model, and looking at the wireframe it appears closer to 500 which would be reasonable.
I’m using the iPhone/Diffuse Detail shader to render the mesh.
Using Unity iPhone 1.5.1
the stats shows whats beeing sent to the gpu, not the vertex count on the model.
The amount of real vertex data that have to be sent to the gpu depend on uv layout, uv sets, material and lights.
What you are looking at is the amount of triangles actually being sent to OpenGLES for rendering. In addition to case where something like the material requires them to be sent twice, other things like hard-normals and non contiguous UV increase vertex/triangle counts significantly compared to what a modeling app or Unity iPhone 1.0.3 tells you. Triangles need to be contiguous in both 3D and UV space to form a strip, so when you have UV seams, degenerate triangles have to be made to form strips - this bumps up the count.
Previously Unity would report triangle counts incorrectly. This was fixed first in the run-time, and recently in the Editor. Now both will report the correct amount of triangles actually being sent to OpenGLES for rendering.
Please see this forum topic for more info: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=31493&highlight=triangle+strip
So, Unity iPhone is pretty much unusable for 3D games, and it has no 2D component - can someone tell me is there anything it actually can do?
If you want approx 7k tris in view at a time, which is a number I’ve seen around the forums… and Unity adds 5 times the amount of polys of the original model… that effectively lets me have one character model, and some basic scenery. No enemies, no pickups, no weapons…
I’m almost done with my FPS 3d game, and Unity is very usable and capable!
Actually, the 7k tris is from back when the stats window was giving the wrong values. So it may actually be more than that.
But Unity can definitely be used for 3D games. Ravensword and the Star Wars: Trench Run game both use it, and are highly successful. You just have to take into account the limitations of the iPhone, and plan accordingly. You wouldn’t want to have lots of Penelope-level characters running around, no. But considering the size of the iPhone screen, you actually don’t need as much detail as you would think.
I guess Ravensword on the AppStore shows what you can do with Unity iPhone 
AFAIK it funs at 10k+ on the iPhone with about 38 draw calls. Thats pretty impressive considering it runs at about 20 FPS on a 3G