I remember back in 1994 I used to use Sculpt 3D, and I had some major scenes that had up to 35,000 triangles. It was brutal on my Mac IIci. Now I can throw around hundreds of thousands of triangles pretty smoothly, on a machine that's much newer than the IIci, but still about 5 years old. Carrara sometimes locks up for me, too, but overall I'm totally amazed at how fast things have become. It's all relative, I guess.