Lots of interesting stuff in that video and I won’t repeat it here. Besides, I want to point to an article over on the Obsidian Edge website (Link) that provides an excellent Q&A guide for people looking to mod the engine. In particular I thought the polycounts were interesting:

Weapons (1st person and 3rd person bind models)
1st person: about 6000 triangles (same as cryengine1; not more really needed – above, normal maps are not needed)
3rd person: about 1500 triangles

Characters
As we are using attachments we have to split the triangle numbers in the separate parts:
* Heads 3k triangles
* Body 5k triangles
* Attachments 1 k triangles

Vehicles
Max. 20000 polygons is our internal limit

Buildings
Hard to answer – put detail were detail is needed. No real need to go crazy. If you only have a few buildings in your level you can spend more triangles, but you should be careful in City maps.

Vegetation
Between 500 and 2500 triangles for trees –whereas the ones with 2500 should not be used in a dense forest because of the filtrate – It heavily depends on the scenery you want to create.

Misc entities
Depends on the size and the complexity.

If you use one material, 300 polygons for a box are ok. This is the minimum number, one set of material should use in an object, as the setup for the renderer is much heavier compared to the actual rendering of these polygons. This also means you do no need LODs for objects lower then 500-600 triangles (given they only use one material).

The polycounts don’t seem all that high really. The character meshes sound almost lightweight compared to what I was expecting.

More importantly, I thought this was especially interesting:

Polycount is not the big problem when rendering our datasets. Material changes and the resulting draw-calls affect performance much more heavily on modern graphics cards than pure triangle count alone.
…
A good advice is to keep the numbers of different materials per object very low and put more polygons into the object. The graphic card can a) handle polygons much better than loading different textures and b) can give you much more detail with lower memory consumption.

They’re just begging for CAD files. I’m liking where things are headed. Would like to know more about their material system; if it’s comparable to the Lucas Arts stuff I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (reLink).