   "focus on 3d terrain programming" terrain engine vs mine !
  Well, right now at work with an GeForce FX 5200 card the "focus on 3d terrain programming" terrain engine when at demo 6.3 in the book runs along nicely at about an average of 200fps. The thing about it though is that every single vertex that is used in a triangle strip is calculated on the fly eg each and every frame it's position and tex coord is calculated.Now, with my terrain engine I calculate all the vertices on startup and load them into a VBO and draw them using glDrawElements. I can't get faster than 80 fps !!I can't even work out why vbos would be slower!    
  Can you explain a little bit more about your process of rendering?  Do you have V-Sync enabled? ... are you using glut?  ... are you using any timing?   ;  Yes make sure that vsync is disabledAnother thing to mention is, VBOs work best with a certain buffer size, I think it was ~ 8mb, but I can say for sure.