Let’s say I’m generating entirely new arrays of geometry per frame, from scratch, including vertex coords, texture coords, normal coords and possibly colors, and also an all new triangle array. All triangles would be visible. All of these have to be set
per frame and then rendered with some basic textured/lit/colored/bumped sort of shader (at worst, just textured at best), how many triangles per frame do you think I should be able to pump out at 1024x768 60fps on an average pc
?
I know some of these variables are a bit vague but maybe you have some idea? I know the bottleneck of submitting new geometry is kinda slow, so are we looking at a few thousand per frame, or 20,000, or?
There’s not really any such thing as an “average” PC, and the resolution doesn’t have any effect anyway. Just try it and find out.
–Eric
Lets say a 5 year old pc, mid-range graphics card. How’s that for average? 
thats considered crap 
How much you can do heavily depends on what and how you do it, 100k - 300k / frame is rather reasonable normally though if its mostly static ones (ie not bone skinned) and if you keep the drawcalls and materials / shaders within reasonable amounts.
if you naturally try to pull of 50k particles, you are doomed, those GPUs won’t handle such fillrate bombs
I suggest you create a build and pass it around to your friends to gather data, and if your friends have crappy laptops try to look at the frame rate until they begin to stutter.
You can even make sure the data will be send to a server/db you own. Limitless posibilities.