That can often be taken further using imposter rendering too. Basically, you render a model to a texture, and then use that on a quad for distant objects. So you get the visual effect of a x polygons object mapped to 2 triangles. As for removing things that won't be on camera manually; frustum, and backface culling is the…
45k for the sequences which are prerendert but still done in realtime at ~12fps but this is not only about characters, clever systems like instancing makes it possible to have millions of polys in one scene, or what about mudbox/zbrush? thats rendering too, they render quite a hell lot of polygons at once, but then start…