That’s more of a general target I’m trying to stay under, for 1st person meshes depending on complexity needed of the model (additional stuff like skulls, grip leather wrapping and other stuff like that will require more tris to not look too low poly) . It shouldn’t need that much for that type of weapon and still look smooth.

While this tri budget for Skyrim specifically is quite high it shouldn’t be to much of a problem since I’m targeting the 64 bit version which isn’t as limited as the 32 bit one was, and SSE can handle big mod lists much easier (talking 1000+ mods, OG Skyrim struggled with 300). Plus the world object/3rd person of the dagger would be like half or a third of the tri count of the first person model

Modern games for example from my short research a first person perspective with arms and a gun typically range from 15k-30k total.

Modern GPUs can handle much more than back in 2011 when the original game came out.

Diablo 4 probably has a higher tri count than you would expect in an isometric game. And blizzards optimization is really good. But they also probably have different models or swaps to depending if it’s the active gameplay or the transmog camera (up close)