Wiley has a point. even my senile old built-in graphics card could handle up to 45-50k polies as long as the texture resolution wasn't too high.
textures is the main chokepoint for graphic cards.... specially since this game processes TGAs which have 4 channels per pixel (5 if you count speculars)
I ran BC on an old 8Mb Diamond card, one of the early designs for the PCI bus, back when it was first introduced..... it rendered the geometry, but not the alpha channels... torpedoes and phasers appeared only as a coloured square lol