The Great Slow Sims, Part Two

Qarl Fizz né Linden on the lag issue, in a comment on this NWN post:

...mostly, when gamers complain about lag - they mean the render speed lag (2), usually measured in frames per second (FPS). the single greatest reason for this lag is the inherent geometric inefficiency of prims. the (only) solution is the meshes project.

Here are two examples. They're simple; you don't have to understand NURBS to see how they work. A plain vanilla cube, the standard prim that everyone starts with, isn't the eight vertices and twelve triangles you'd expect, but fifty-six vertices and 108 triangles. A wall of a small cabin: with mesh, twenty-four vertices. With prims, 336 vertices.

Will people suddenly go back and totally redo their builds with mesh? I doubt it--but if these are representative examples, isn't cutting the work of rendering down by an order of magnitude tempting?