something is not quite right in blender viewportville.
trying to optimize playback, going from solid to wire, same framerate. going into bounding box only, same framerate. 
nothing’s right then.
also, what is softimage doing? they can render that massive millions of polys in animation in viewport?
I mean is the problem putting vertices on screen? or is it reading model structures when being modified etc. hum. shouldn’t that data be raw?
I have no clue, maybe someone could enlighten me a bit.
Isn’t Blender stuck with a really old version of OpenGL for backwards compatibility with old (very old!) hardware?
no I don’t think so. also viewport navigation goes smooth. but playback doesn’t. and when just bounding boxes are shown, it should go really fast but doesn’t.
Does Blender do hardware skinning for the animation modifier(s)?
I wonder if it reads the entire mesh to get the bounding box dimensions which makes it as slow as rendering the entire mesh on the animation timeline.
I’ve noticed a huge slowdown with the past few months releases. Not sure what the problem is.