OpenGL question

I'm using VBOs to render my scene of about ~20k tris yet i'm getting ~50fps.

I've look at other peoples results and i always see people talking about how they get 100k++ tris with 500+ fps most of the time when doing VBOs

For my matrix manipulation i still use the immediate mode, could that be the problem?

>>4
This mean that its hardware acceleration was SHIT. No, really. We have HW acceleration for a reason. And "running as fast as SW" is not it.