Quote:

The draw rate is intensely high, probably several terapixels or even petapixels per second



Sorry that's simply not true. Did you just make this up? The fill rate is limited to the 3d card. The peak(max) fill rate of a plain GeForce 6800 is about 3900 megapixels. The fastest card for fill rate available now is the Radeon X800, which peaks at around 8320 Megapixels. A petapixel card is absurd. No card will ever reach that kind of speed in a standard scanline renderer. By the time processors are fast enough for that, they probabably wont use pixels anymore but something else, like voxels, vectors or rays.

Quote:

Texture quality has almost nothing to do with the frame rate



Again, not true.. it all depends on your video card, not the A6 engine..it doesnt matter what your experiments show, its dependednt on your video card. Larger textures will always impact framrate, sometimes its neglibile, sometimes not.,. it also depends on what you doign with the textures. In my own D3D engine experiments, using multiple render targets and shaders with many texture reads, a differnce of 256 and 512 can make a HUGE impact.

The true fact of the matter is, the A6 engine is a standard D3D engine, and is able to acheive similar results as most other engines. I imagine the core rendere is very straightforward.. so in general, it's performance will always be broadly dependent the target platform. This is the case with nearly all modern engines. this is why i think this a bad quetion to ask "how many polys an engine can handle".. On every 3D engine forum i've been on, this same question is asked over and over.. the answer is always the same. Use a search function..

All that said, if you are using advanced shader techniques such as per-pixel lighting, certain optimazations can be done on an engine level to take take advantage of the z-buffer and draw order to improve performance. This is not currently availble in the engine. So the Doom 3 engine will be able to draw more per-pixel lit polys than the A6 engine. The point of A6 is not to meet every specific need of a certain game, but to meet general needs.

As general rule, dont worry about polygon count, worry about performance. If your 10,000 polygon model seems to run fine, than use it...there is not limit to the number of polygons D3D can draw per scene. A typical D3D render loop looks like this:

Device-> BeginScene()
...
//infinite length rendering calls, infinite number of draw primitives, etc...
//you could draw a billion meshes here if you wanted.. it would just take all //day for a frame.
...
Device-> EndScene()

Just try to make it run well on your target platform.. thats all you can do.