Total triangle budget for a one skinned character app, iOS 26 and later

Hello,

I’m working on an iOS app built around a single skinned character with fur, rendered in Metal and shown in close-up, so it takes up most of the screen. It needs to run at a steady 60fps, and the oldest hardware I want to support is the A15 (iPhone 13). The fur will be alpha cards layered over the base mesh. All of the character’s motion is computed on the GPU each frame, and ARKit and Vision hand tracking are running at the same time.

This is what I have so far. A 180k-triangle test character with no hair cards runs smoothly in the Simulator on my Mac (yes, I know it's not entirely representative of the GPU numbers on a phone). On an actual iPhone 16, a synthetic bench (60k vertices, 4 influences each) put GPU skinning at 1.1 to 1.3 ms whether I used 250 joints or 1000, so I’m not worried about skinning.

The final model is still being built, so I can’t test the real thing yet, but I have to give the modeler a budget now. I’m thinking of 100k to 120k triangles in total, base mesh plus alpha cards. Would that look fairly reasonable for an A15, or not?

Thanks!