I've been creating Enscape custom assets that seems to warn me that having over 20k polys is a problem. They weren't kidding - even adding one with no other geometry blue screens my system!
Is this just a limit on how we can use Enscape assets or do we have a limit for how many polys our proxy assets can be?
It's always a good thing to limit poly counts. Use TRANSMUTR Transmutr or similar soft'
The 20k is not a hard limit. It depends on a number of factors including:
- how much you go over the limit (1 million polygons is going to be a way bigger problem than 30 000)
- how many times the high poly asset will show up in the model (and even more so: in the same view)
- the complexity of scene as a whole (if this is a small scene or a giant project)
- your hardware
- the way you're running Enscape (resolution of your screen, regular mode or VR, ...).
We have some assets that go over the limit, but we try never to go over it by a lot. Of our 600 custom assets only 5% is over the 20k limit and only 4 assets are over 100.000. Those 4 are unique assets (artwork) that only show up once in the entire project, and for which we couldn't find a realistic way to simplify them.
My advise: do some trial and error, err on the side of caution when you can.
As far as I'm aware, the total scene size will be: main file + linked files + assets. It will depend on your hardware whether the total scene size will run smoothly. I've seen scenes of millions of poligons run smoothly, but there's always going to be an upper limit for each hardware configuration.
As far as scene sizes go, 20.000 is very low. We've run scenes with waaaaay more than that. Maybe the issue you're having is not related to polycount?
Yeah hardware shouldn't be an issue with those specs 
So it could be an issue with the file itself, your drivers or a bug in enscape. Do you have other users in your office/group that can test the file you're having trouble with?
Never had an issue with assets over 20,000k, your graphics card should easily power through larger assets.
I am running on a nvidia quadro rtx 8000.
Most of my custom 3d people are 100k polys and using Max tree libraries. I have a few special models over 1 million. The only issues I used to experience was texture loading delays, but with the new texture threading update, I have seen huge improvements.
The gold standard for this issue would be to implement dynamic Level Of Detail (LOD) handling at render time - particularly for stills. At present Enscape is virtually unable to render stills of many of my scenes and I have not yet managed to export a 360 panorama at all.
What might help is using dynamic polygon reduction to simplify long distance, out of shot and overly complex models and textures.