You’ve provided very few details here. You don’t describe what you’re rendering, how you’re rendering it, whether you’re updating VBOs dynamically, or even how you’re timing. And there’s no source code shown.
Please see The Forum Posting Guidelines for tips in composing a post that’s more likely to net you the answers you want.
Also, don’t post in old threads (see Guideline #6). The threads you appended your original posts to where very, very old. I’ve moved them here into this new thread, linking to the older threads for reference.
To your question: That VBOs can be slower than NVIDIA’s GL display lists, particularly with lots of tiny draw calls, has been well known for a long time:
- https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/bindless-graphics/
- https://developer.download.nvidia.com/opengl/tutorials/bindless_graphics.pdf
There are lots of threads in the forum archives on this, and techniques you can use to get around this.
Batching your content better (into fewer draw calls and fewer buffer objects) can reduce the cost considerably. Using VAOs can also reduce it. Alternatively, using NVIDIA bindless graphics extensions and/or display lists can bypass much of this overhead, even for pathologically bad use cases (lots of tiny draw calls, spread out across many small buffer objects).
However, whether this is your problem is totally unclear given the lack of details in your original post.