What does 'Polygon' mean in terms of 3D Graphics?

direct3d

Solution

That book means triangles. Otherwise, what if I wanted 1000-sided polygons? Could I still achieve 2000-4000 such shapes per frame?

Problem

An old Direct3D book says "...you can achieve an acceptable frame rate with hardware acceleration while displaying between 2000 and 4000 polygons per frame..." What is one polygon in Direct3D? Do they mean one primitive (indexed or otherwise) or one triangle?

Original source