My thought is that the graphics card still has to transform ALL faces that are sent to it, before it can determine which are back facing. And then perhaps, by eliminating back facing faces, some processing is saved in texturing, lighting, etc.
And to determine it yourself, you need to transform vertices on CPU - which is a LOT more costly that throwing it at GPU (for modern cards at least).
Generally, think about object-level optimalizations, not-triangle based ones. For triangles, just find a fastest way to bulk transfer it to GPU and let it handle the rest.
Artur
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