When using immediate mode drawing I get roughly 500 fps (60 rendered frames per second so roughly 9 frames of logic per rendered frame), when changing absolutely nothing other than changing to vertex array and glDrawArrays, I drop down to roughly 120fps.

http://i.imgur.com/ToaW9Ur.png (linked because it's a pretty big image, also "frames displayed last second" is a mistake, it's not the displayed frames any more -used to be- it's the number of logic loops, actual rendered fps is a solid 60)

The reason I tried vertex arrays was because I thought it was supposed to be faster than immediate mode (single operation stream instead of multiple). Am I doing something drastically wrong?

Would vertex buffer objects be faster? How would I implement that in the current code?

Note: I don't show any other code because they are otherwise identical, and I made sure of that.

Ah yes, taking out the Enable/disable, should have thought of that, however it made little if no difference at all.

And the builds are exactly the same, same compiler settings, same code except for that draw code.

The array thing can't be avoided to an extent, the tiles are called from the same texture but with differing sub-bitmap positions, and are not pre-set, so regardless that array will have to be set to differing values every tile, unless I set hundreds of bytes of data aside... Which I'd rather not do when immediate mode is so much faster, at around 300fps when I put the array creation into it for no reason at all other than to see how much it would bog it down. And the draw code is generic, not just for drawing tilemaps, any further optimization to that regard set-multi-array grids, would make it less useful for freely positioned sprites.

Seeing as how immediate mode is so much faster and making this work with optimized array creation etc. would take more work than it's worth I think it would be pointless.

So is there a better way of doing it? A more OpenGL ES way? FBOs (I'm too tired to look into that right now)

I was writing a little rendering engine for multiple platforms. One of the target devices was a broadcom digital set top box.

In testing I was getting 200fps on my very old MacBook, 210fps on my Samsung S3, then I tested it on the broadcom box and got 20fps.

This confused me a lot as on paper it should be more powerful than the S3.

After a few iterations I tried using VBO's

MacBook 215fps (faster, but not by much)

S3 235fps (faster, but not by much)

Broadcom 325fps (WTF!!!!!)

You are working on top of other peoples code. Your graphics drivers can be your friend or your enemy.

If you have the performance you need on the platform you are targeting, LEAVE IT ALONE

Spend your coding time on the bits of the code that aren't working yet, you can always come back and change something later if you find a need

The reason I tried vertex arrays was because I thought it was supposed to be faster than immediate mode (single operation stream instead of multiple). Am I doing something drastically wrong?

Vertex arrays and buffers work well for small (and a quad is very small in this meaning) vertex count per object if and only if objects are batched. When not batching, many small draw calls are executed, so the cost-benefit ratio is high and the overhead per draw call is killing your performance. The "immediate" in "immediate mode" is nowadays just a relict. In fact, the driver does batching internally, and you never really know when rendering actually happens.

The array thing can't be avoided to an extent, the tiles are called from the same texture but with differing sub-bitmap positions, and are not pre-set, so regardless that array will have to be set to differing values every tile, unless I set hundreds of bytes of data aside...

The usual way is to allocate arrays big enough to hold a couple of, say, some hundreds sprites, invoke a rendering routine that actually batches by writing the quads to the arrays, and cause an OpenGL level draw call only if either the arrays are full, the scene is finished, or alternative settings (texture, blending, shader, …) enforce a draw call.

… Which I'd rather not do when immediate mode is so much faster, at around 300fps when I put the array creation into it for no reason at all other than to see how much it would bog it down.

The reason to get rid of immediate mode, as well as the matrix stack and some other stuff, if possible is because it is deprecated.

I guess that integer image coordinates are not supported by GPU and they are convertex to floats on the way