I am wondering if anyone has some metrics or even a general guide as to when the use of vertex buffers outweighs immediate mode drawing for performance.
I have a mix of static and dynamic objects. The dynamic objects vertices are calculated very often (30-60 time/sec), immediate mode is giving me the best performance (none of them will have huge vertex counts). Though this suprised me a bit, I figured the JNI overhead would mean buffers would always win, but they are about 5% slower (not sure why, it may be my video card).
The static objects are the ones I am concerned about. With very large objects buffers is winning hands down (say over 300k verts) with gains of 15-20 fps over immediate mode rendering. But for smaller static objects (< 50k) they seem about the same. (ARB buffers)
Basically, what I am asking is: What would be a good number (in vertices) to use as a guidelne for using vertex buffers over immediate mode?