Would 1 million faces/vertices be too much for Blender?

Question

I am working on an interior design which might end up with having 1 millions faces. I already have about 40k faces/vertices so far. While loading Blender in solid mode only takes seconds, it takes about 70s to render the whole scene in Material preview mode, which greatly slow down the efficiency of doing texturing. My strategy is doing the modeling and texturing for each single object in a separate blender project and append it once the object is complete but manipulating the whole scene is still inevitable, plus that I've only done about 1/20 of the whole work, I am just worried that the performance won't be acceptable then. The machine I am using is Microsoft Surface Book 2, below is the specs:

Intel Core i7-8650U CPU 1.90GHz CPU cores: 4 16GB RAM Intel® HD Graphics 620 integrated GPU (on Intel® i5-8350U model) NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 discrete GPU w/6GB GDDR5 graphics memory

I am wondering if I need to get a better machine considering the fact that I might have 1 million faces/vertices in the end. Do you have any recommendation for the machine based on this requirement (or a better strategy)?

Answer 1

1 000 000 faces shouldn't be a problem.
High facecount by itself won't slow down renders very much, this isn't the 90s.

Viewport is slowed down by high memory - face count, high-res textures and complex shaders
Render is slowed down by high light-bounces, HDRIs, and complex shaders (glass, SSS)

To keep memory low (and viewport fast):

• link objects, don't append them when building a scene
• use lower Subdivision levels for Viewport
• use Simplify in Rendertab to lower texture resolution for viewport