Quote - > Quote - Okay so let me see if I got this... Both Hedd and Tony say that going with a low poly mesh, then baking the texture is preferable to sculpting a detailed high poly mesh. So what determines quality?

you burn a high "lets say a million" polycount displacement map for a 20.000 polycount SubD character.
displacement maps will rase the polycount to a million at render time.
normal maps will keep the polycount at 20.000 at render time.

you burn  a high polycount normal map for a 3000 polycount game character.
so the polycount stays at 3000 but looks like a million polycount character

The killer details ya see in zBrush gallery is from high polycount meshes.
zBrush will go to a billion polycount mesh.but they would be a real pain to rig & impossible to use real time so we keep the polycount low and use normal maps.

Well, I've always  assumed that there's some "sweet spot" for meshes and textures. In other words, where the details that can be sculpted in a mesh, are best left to a map. Particularly, in a program like Poser that bogs down under high polycounts, versus games where you can use higher polycounts but you have more dedicated hardware and memory designed to handle them.