One complex face vs. several simpler faces

Hello,

I was thinking about how to handle and object - if several smaller faces will have worse impact on performance than one complex face. I suppose they would due to more faces, more texture calls and more draw call. Correct me if I am wrong. Thank you.

Yes, but no

This is an incredibly complex question to answer fully. Some basic points:

1. Any faces containing transparency must be depth sorted and renderered separately. (~ x3 impact of a solid face)
   
2. Similarly, a transparent face cannot be cached as such .
   
3. If a face / combination of faces are static, contain no transparency and are and within the same object, they will likely be combined into a single draw call. Greater numbers of verticies will increase loading time, and the initial stutter when a block is first made visible, but not FPS after that.
   
4. Avoid texture shifts if at all possible. These are expensive, and mean that a new draw call must be started.
   
5. Duplicate vertices will be eliminated in most cases (If an object contains more than 10,000 verticies, no duplicate elimination is done)