87 Million Faces...Too big but struggling with decimation.

[Vantage_DS]

Hi all...

I have a large area UAV mapped 3D model with around 87 million faces. It's currently 8GB exported (obj with texture).

I understand it needs to be decimated, but even at 20 million it's looking a bit ugly and still remains at 1GB.... I'm not really sure what to do.
I'm viewing the same model created on a cloud solution and the quality is just as good, but i know for a fact it's not 8GB!

The model in question was created from 680 images, split into 10 chunks (RAM), a High Quality model was produced from each chunk, textured, then merged - I just wanted a textured mesh and no point cloud was created.

Could it be that not having a point cloud lowers the quality of a decimated mesh?


Thanks.