yeah, i notice the ED209 doesn't actually, you know, MOVE, or do anything useful.

In an actual commercial game that you can play at more than 1 frame-per-second, shaders > polys.

Animation and texturing a model are not necessary to show off a modelers skills.
Also, pretty sure optimus prime in the latest transformers movie was at LEAST this high a poly count. 3d rendering isn't exclusively the domain of games.

Before things get out of hand, I feel that I should chime in with my 2 bits. I have poly modeled a few cars around the 30-40k poly range and can tell you that using that many polies isn't a huge accomplishment. That said, the poly structure is laid out pretty well. Modeling using quads (as was done with this model) makes for a neater looking mesh, but can create headaches when it comes time to render.

In reference to charliem's comment, I'm not sure if there was sarcasm in that post, but I'm going to treat it as though there was not. According to this article, Optimus Prime from the Transformers movie weighed in around 1.8 million polygons.

Memorare is correct though, shaders can hide the poly count of a well-built model. But if the underlying structure is crap, you can shade and mesh-smooth till you're blue in the face and it will still look like crap, just shinier.

Please put down your weapon - You have 20 seconds to comply!!!!
...5, 4, 3, 2, 1, BlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlam!!!!!

Well I posted it because it was a nice model of ED - and I don't see how 16K polys is 'high' - You could certainly render this realtime.

As far as videogames go - high poly modelling is more important now - If your platform supports pixel shaders you can (like in Gears) render the high poly model to a lower poly model, giving you millions of polys of detail minus the rendering cost. In Gears Marcus Felix is 15000 polys (a higher poly 5,000,000 or more poly model is used to create a normal map)

It's a nice model of ED-209