As expected, I guess, though you wouldn't have to worry about triangles and tessellation unless you were actually working with vertex lighting, which no one would. With the introduction of shaders videocards were able to support per pixel lights in hardware.
I do wonder how Doom 3 was able to throw around as many lights as it did, though. I mean I realize two or three passes is significantly less of a hit than say the double digit passes you might need to match a modern deferred pipeline, but still, Doom 3 was throwing around a lot of per pixel lights in its day. Did Carmack use some tricks there, akin to the way that Wind Waker used inverted spheres or some games have used straight up blended textures to fake lights?