“In this example frame the game renders 13 sets of teeth, and their visual impact on the frame is zero: not a single pixel is affected.”
One citizen’s mouth and teeth mesh runs 6108 vertices. A whole character is about 56 thousand, more than a low-density house. A parking booth carries over 40K vertices with no LODs, down to individually modelled cables routed through a hole in the desk. The studio shipped a city builder that draws hundreds of copies of models nobody can see. Players bought the hardware to pay for it.