Nope. The limit is part of the HL engine, or more specifically, the software renderer. Anything past 800 in software will be untextured and bring up errors. People simply have been more liberal in the r_speeds as time and computer hardware advances. One you get a few thousand polygons however, you're just asking for trouble. People who can run HL2 on full at 100FPS will be fine with maps containing thousands of world polygons but others like, me won't. What's the maximum for world polygons anyways? I should push it. A room spanning the entirety of the maximum map boundaries, filled with 1x1x1 unit cubes, placed so you can see half of them.