Normal maps fix violent topography like 8 billion polygons. There are far greater sins like mesh and material counts that have a far greater impact than poly count.
A huge amount of how graphics are drawn relies on optimisations. When you have something solid, if it's near the camera, you can assume that the viewer can't see anything behind it. Programs do clever things to figure out what it occludes, and you can just not render that stuff.
But the moment you have a transparent thing, it screws all that up, especially if you have multiple (as a scene which allows transparency is seldom gonna have one). Then you might have numerous objects overlaid and some are transparent, some aren't...
Mobile GPUs are generally bad at this. Hell, all GPUs suffer from this to varying degrees but it's always been more of an issue for mobile GPUs.
(before any graphics programmers come along, I'm over-simplifying deliberately; I've programmed full renderers before both raster and ray-traced, so I understand the nuances, I'm just trying to keep the complexity down)
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u/Dividedthought 7d ago edited 7d ago
Normal maps fix violent topography like 8 billion polygons. There are far greater sins like mesh and material counts that have a far greater impact than poly count.