curly the two pictures you posted are really out of context. the wt plane looks shiny as it if it just came out of the factory. the aces high picture looks worn out as if it has been baking in the dessert for too long. and that is how the ah skin is supposed to look.
semp
The purpose of posting that picture was to illustrate that the polygon count of both models was similar. Poly-counts use to be the go to standard on how graphical fidelity was judged. Adding polygons won't make the game necessarily look better. It's really the most brute force approach to graphics.
Just from playing with graphics settings, I think there still a ton of overhead to play with in both the pixel shading and the geometric shading. Pixel shading and geometric shading combined is where you're going to get the most bang for your buck. While lower end GPU's don't handle geometric shading well. I think its more scalable than a vertex approach because you're not using render distances as the control of performance, ie FPS.
It also allows the player to customize the graphics more to their liking. IE they can say, I will live with short render distances, but have more eye candy in those short distances. I think that's where part of the false allegation of inefficiency in Aces' graphics engine comes from. In that if you cull the view distances there isn't much more atmospheric enhancement you can do. The only enchantments beyond the vertex shades are the bump, and specular maps. The function of which is binary as its either totally on or off.
When people go for max graphics, they go shadows, bump maps and max textures and view distance. What kills the frame rate is the view distance. You end up rendering so many vertices they fill that graphics pipeline so fast that the frame rate drops, while all the other parallel pipelines remain mostly idle. Which why even modern rigs can be very taxed when running aces at max settings. If one simply adds more vertices to the terrain textures view distances have to drop exponentially in relation to the number of vertices added to the terrain. The engine becomes better suited to being run on workstation optimized to render vertices rather than a desktop card which tends to optimize texture fill rates.
Which is why I say you get more bang for buck by looking into lighting effects as a means to enhance graphics. Ambient occlusion, Anisotropic Filtering, and some post processing would go all further to enhance the graphics.
