Level of Detail Support for Player Models?

[Flying Steel]

Depends on whether quad is tessellated into 2 triangles (by the gpu), or not (manipulated directly). OpenGL has specific command to draw rectangles (glRect), which could/should be optimized more than drawing two GL_TRIANGLES or one GL_QUADS, but not all quads are rects.

Which just leaves the question of how does Nexuiz treate a quad, as a quad or a couple of tris?

You could experiment with creating very high poly model from quads and another from triangles. (quad_count = triangle_count). We could test this on different GPU's, set of drivers (OpenGL implementations).

That's a good idea, I think I'll do that when I know how to get models into and working in Nexuiz.

[Alien]

I doubt darkplaces use software tessellation of quads. There would be no obvious reason, but either lh or div knows better.