What are Triangles actually?

What does it mean, i know if a mesh have many triangles it will decrease fps. Is many triangles the same as high poly object? whats the difference?

A triangle is one of the basic shapes in geometry: a polygon with three corners or vertices and three sides or edges which are line segments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle

One vertex is a point in space, two vertexes in different places can have a line drawn between them and three vertexes can be connected and filled with a surface which makes a Tri. Two Tri’s compose a Quad, which is only 4 vertexes since the two tri’s share a lot of the same vertex data, making them nice and efficient. Quads / Tri’s are polygons.

If you add lots of polygons (or anything, really…) it will affect performance because the processor has to compute it all.

Thanks for good answeres !