Not necessarily. Triangle-Count is not the only thing that may contribute to a low frame rate. From my own test, in fact, I noticed that Triangle-Count is one of the most irrelevant factors for a low frame rate, depending on the GPU you have.
As most modern day GPUs can easily handle millions of triangles at a time, their shader units are sometimes the real bottle neck. As per-pixel lighting done on GPU is the default case in Away3D, having one single plane covering most of the view frustum and being shaded can cause a major drop in frame rate on low-end GPUs as found on many laptop computers. Triangle-Count, in that case, is irrelevant.
I’d guess that if the poly counter decreases, frustum culling is done correctly.
Is there anything else within the frustum that is rendered?
Is there any CPU processing going on? Slow AS3 execution also results in a low frame rate.
Cheers!
Alex