Seems unlikely. Neither look like more than a few dozen vertices. The version with the normal map is likely going to be significantly larger in GPU resources

Seems unlikely. Neither look like more than a few dozen vertices. The version with the normal map is likely going to be significantly larger in GPU resources due to the texture storage. That said... how is this news, exactly? Bump/normal mapping was a novel, new fangled technique back in the late 1990's... In its original form, it actually predates programmable GPUs.