My big take away with the whole City Skylines 2 performance issue and the lack of LOD was that geometry processing is so cheap nowadays. So long as you aren't too reckless with geometry in terms of sub-pixel rendering, you don't really have to worry about it too much any more.
It isn't like the Ps2 era when geometry time was a real concern on render times. Even a modern low end GPU could process a few hundred million polygons a second without sweating it, now getting the result son screen is a very different issue.
Yeah, PS2's Graphics Synthesizer had a fill rate of 1.2 GB/s. For comparison, the OG Xbox had 0.932 GB/s, and the GameCube had 0.648GB/s. Assuming only 1 texture here.
The Xbox was released 1 year later, for context.
Sony also demo'd the GSCube once, it had 16 Graphics Synthesizers, achieving a fill rate of 37.7 GB/s (no textures, half that with 1... I think). Eventually they ditched the idea in favour of Nvidia's solution.
