Amounts of polygon numbers engine can push is usualy stated as millions in secound.
It is very important that U compare amounts with something or it will come meaningless.
But yes in interview with designer he told that engine could do around 20M polygons per secound. But that does not tell much about how much of polygons end up in screen, or if they are rendered in screen, but has been blocked by building. "or something"
Also in case of GT3 remember that each enviroment map contains 6 images of surrounding area, but again they probably did use highly simlified version of the track for those.
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One of the most important things in rendering any graphics in games "or similar applications" is to prevent machine to go through all that meaningless data that is not viewed. yes u can have 3d world of 50K polygons and render and rotate each one of them for every frame. very easy to do, but with little effort u can have 1000K polygons in the world, with less power used for graphics. this with simple checks if u should even start to think objects behind U or if objects are just too far to see "ie. behind curvature of earth".
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