I think the pixel being refered to there is screen pixels not texels. Having tons of triangles that are at times going to be crammed into a few screen pixels is far from ideal. ie some very detailed object with lots of tri that can be seen from a far distance, Good LODs go a very long way to reduce these dense hotspot…
triangles that are smaller than a screen pixel are not only pointless but also cause seemingly disproportionate inefficiencies when rendering. In the simplest terms, every triangle that lives in a pixel causes it to be processed again. (this is a gross oversimplification before anyone picks me up on it) Fwiw @"Alex Javor"…
i dont know if i would characterize it as 'preferable' but there is a case to be made that polys are easy to crunch and small tiling textures are fast to access. performance is relative, so its really impossible to answer your second question with a definitive answer. meaning, if you have low triangle count but large…