QUOTE:
oh forgot to add 500k polys is a bit high, try reducing it down to no more than 80k and use texturing, deformers, bump mapping etc to fake the effects of being more detailed, especially if you plan on animating it. If it is just for a still image I'll milk it a entire scene to a max of 400k polys, or I start runing into Mem allocation errors when rendering, (trans mapping and lighting don't mix well in Carrara and almost kills Daz if I forget to have the hair not to cast shadow maps)My graphics card can handle 3-4 billion polys at once, but starts getting laggy around 1.75 - 2.5 billion when I start moving things around. I need to get a station card myself, I am just waiting to see where Vista is going before I start sinking some money into more hardware.