“If you’ve used more triangles than there are pixels on the screen, you’ve messed up.”
I call this kind of thing the “kilobyte rule” because a similar common problem is shoving tens of megabytes of JSON down the wire to display about a kilobyte of text in a browser.
It’s actually very nearly optimal: using as many triangles as needed to display as much detail as possible while staying under the one triangle per pixel limit.
That’s the opposite of using 10K pixels to render two pixels on the screen.
