Definition/speed trade-off

[MKG]

Dooohhhh! I've just clicked. Now I know why animated scenes are nowhere near as realistic as rendered stills.

My question is, though, has anyone ever tried to quantify the trade-off? Is there a realism/practicality graph for animations anywhere? I've searched, and a lot of people mention the trade-off - but it appears at the moment that it's a suck it and see situation.

It does seem to me that some knowledge of the point at which the law of diminishing returns comes into operation would be an important input at the project planning stage (in particular, my project planning, so that I don't spend months trying to climb a glass tree).

Anyone any ideas?

[JP]

Well it all depends on the hardware you're working with. On PC the hardware differs so much between different PCs that that's the biggest factor. But then there's other factors such as how good you are at optomising etc.

Not sure what you mean by animations though as they don't really drag down performance i don't think, it's mostly large numbers of polys which will cause you problems.