Vertex Buffer Object (fps test)

My own testing of frame rate of glBegin/glEnd vs Vertex Buffer Object.

Core 2 Duo / NVidia 8600GTS:

 pts   vbo glb/e  ratio
 100  3900  3900   1.00
  1k  3800  3200   1.18
 10k  3600  2700   1.33
100k  1500   400   3.75
  1m   213    49   4.34
 10m    24     5   4.80

pts - number of points to draw,
vbo - vertex buffer object,
glb/e - glBegin/glEnd,
the number is frames per second.

The test was done in C++. In Python VBOs shown ratios of 100-10000 (times faster).

Additional tests:

                vbo   glb/e
1m triangles     20       7
1m lines         28      20

Results

Average modern video card can render up to 1 million on-screen triangles at reasonable framerate via VBO. This doesn't include processing shaders.

VBO is up to 5 times faster than glBegin/glEnd.

Calling glBegin/glEnd for each triangle or once for all triangles didn't have much difference in terms of framerate.

Note that glBegin/glEnd is considered deprecated now.