you should treat your geometry and texture pipelines separately.
it is true that high rez textures and background will slow things down.
but lowering your polycount _won't_ speed it up.
you have to go to the source of the problem.
for example, you can take what you have now, and replace your ships with boxes (but using the same textues), and your fps will only go up a little bit.
this is of course to some limit, I.E. 20 ships at once and you'll start to see some drop with your 3K models (but it'll be a linear degradation, not an instant crash in fps like when you exceed texture memory and start using AGP mem)
saturate your textures, using simple boxes.
see what texture resolutions you can use before FPS really drops.
then make super high poly spheres, with crap 4x4 textures, and see how high you can get your polys before fps gets too slow.
then back both off a bit and you have a good setup.
i can say without a doubt, that you can go higher than you are (seeing from the fs2 models in shots).
you may upset people with aged systems, but anyone with recent stuff (that wasn't some off the shelf dell that comes with integrated crap of course) will not even see a change in performance, but will see the change in looks.
we've used 3-7K models in mfq3 since 2 years ago. and have some that are 15K now.
plus the environment has its own couple 100 K to add to that (its quake so..).
and everything uses textures well over 512 (1024x1024 is typical for a single texture and that would cover a single wing surface or something...)
i get (1500mhz w/ 9700pro) around 90 fps constant at 1600x1200x32.
so without a doubt you can go higher
maybe FS2 engine has some overhead in itself that doesn't scale as well as quake, so you might not be able to be as frivalous with textures and geometry. but nevertheless, you should still be able to handle (in fs2) 5-7K with 2 or 3 1024x1024 maps, in an up to date system (not the latest, but a 'good' setup).
i guess the real problem is in the hardware disparity.
you can have:
a fresh 9800XT with 256 megs
a 9700 with 128
a gf4 with 128
a gf3 with 64
a gf2 with 32
a 7500/8500
ALL of these you can call new, or at least recent. but the performance between the top of the list and the bottom is jaw dropping.
what i say wouldn't be right for the bottom of the list at all. (well, things still scale the same way, but the max tolerance is much less).
if you're aimed at the bottom of the list as your typical user, then you're dead on, don't change a thing.
but if you're to the middle or top, then you can afford a lot more polys than 3K/model.
-scheherazade
P.S. tolwyn
i'm not telling you what to do, in case my rant sounds like that.
i love the progress you guys have made. its totally amazing.
i love your stuff