I never said there were no materials in the X file, I've said several pages back actually. What I'm saying is that the materials are useless in this context.
You misunderstood me or I explained myself wrong, when you load the model into the engine, only the model goes in, no matter how you do it. Materials don't, even if you can see it in the SDK applications. Doesn't matter how you try it. Heck, in C++ I have to load the model and the texture or it will be white. Maybe in C++ there's another way of doing it that I don't know about, but in FPSC you will have to do what I stated in the previous post.
I know it's in the model, but the colors (in this case materials) are not read when the model is put into the engine, and what you are showing is not the engine, it's an application to see meshes.
You can put it in any 3D software, you will always see the materials because that software was designed to do exactly that.
When you load it into the game engine, the game engine is designed for you to give it an unwrapped texture and the mesh, disregarding the materials in it. As far as I know, DirectX does not even know what a material is because that's a 3DS Max implementation, not a DirectX implementation. When you export 3DS to X, the materials go with it, unless you say otherwise, that does not mean you can use it.
Regarding the poly count, the higher it is, the slower it will be. If you don't have an issue with that, that's fine. I usually do.
Cut the "I'm showing you" please, I gave up and I'm writing what I know, if this is not helpful, I'll simply stop it here and let you sort it out yourself. What I've written above will work, you just have to do it. As far as I know, there are no workarounds in this matter.
I'm pretty sure I know everything. Doubts are something rare in me and I am never wrong, as this signature can prove.