Actually, the important limit is what you don't see in Max: the vertex limit. Vertex unit load and video memory consumption are proportional to the vertex count, not the triangle count (the index buffer is tiny compared to the vertices). And unwrapping, tangent space generation etc. increase the vertex count by duplicating vertices, while deceptively keeping the triangle count the same. This increase is sometimes drastic (although not on characters, where there are few seams).