I prefer frames to polygons. As others have said, though, FPS has no real correlation to the "size" of a game. Let me explain.
Basically, frames per second is the number of times the screen you're watching is refreshed with a new rendering of the events of the game. Obviously, more times per second looks smoother. 30 is a nice benchmark, but 60 looks really buttery.
There are SO MANY things that can affect what frame rate a game achieves, but the short version is that you want your graphics processing to be as computationally simple as possible.
How can you achieve this? A number of ways. First, though, we need to understand a little bit about the graphics pipeline (ie, the steps the graphics card goes through every time it renders a scene).
The short version is basically that the relevant models for a scene are created. They're then transformed into world space. Then the camera is transformed to the appropriate viewing angle. Then lighting is applied (this step is time consuming). Then things are appropriately scaled to deal with the fact that 3D graphics are projected onto a 2D viewing space. Then polygons that can't currently be seen are discarded. Then the process called "rasterization" begins, wherein each pixel on the screen is assigned a color based on the camera position, lighting, and models previously generated. Shaders, texturing, and other things are also other steps along the way, but those are whole other rabbit holes. To get 60 fps, you have to do all of that 60 times per second (and have a >=60hz display).
Anyway, with this in mind, a couple of things should be clear. A) The less lighting and modeling you have going on, the easier it's gonna be on your graphics card B) the fewer pixels on your screen, the easier as well.
This is why "smaller" games tend to run at higher FPS (they tend to have less complicated lighting models, shaders, etc). This is also why it's easier to run at 60fps in 720p than it is at 1080p. This is also why it's so easy to make HD remakes of older games run at 60 fps. Because the newer hardware is much better than what the remade game previously ran on, it can almost certainly run whatever lighting and shading algorithms were being run originally, but much faster.
Ultimately, though, the reason big games aren't at 60 fps is because developers are
lazy. Any number of big budget games have been 60fps, it's not impossible. But devs began to realize that the development time required to ensure 60fps was not seeing any kind of return on investment. No one wouldn't buy a game just because it was 30 fps instead of 60 fps, even though 60 looks better. Insomniac Games pretty famously declared not long ago that one of the Ratchet and Clank games was going to be their last 60fps game for this reason.
So in short, size of a game and its FPS are not inherently related. It's just that the big budget titles tend to have fancy lighting algorithms and high poly character models, which is taxing on console graphics cards. They could probably squeeze 60fps out if they wanted, but without a meaningful ROI, they won't.
However, my friend Jelly/Jerry prefers 60 FPS, saying that 60 FPS games are alot more stable and have less of a chance of freezing, but if every game was 60 FPS, games would be smaller, giving less life.
Neither of these arguments is true. Frame rate has no meaningful relationship to propensity to freeze, and as I said above, FPS has no meaningful correlation with size of a game.
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