I finally have my engine loading multiple objects and putting them into a queue for drawing. I created a test file to see how many polygons it could render and at what speed. The 3ds file contains 4 objects all the same, 25000 verts and 25000 faces totaling about 100000 faces. Now i get good results when the engine is running but I see no difference when backface culling is turned on or off. From what i understand you should just turn on BfC and get results but it would still go through its entire drawing routine and just skip the rendering of the triangles. Am i using it right?

here is my init code:

int BLUE3D::InitGL(int sw,int sh)
{
glViewport(0,0,sw,sh);

glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH);
glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.5f);
glClearDepth(1.0f);

glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
glDepthFunc(GL_LEQUAL);
glHint(GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL_NICEST);
//glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE);

Put those verts in a list or something. YOu're wasting too much time calling functions.

As timm said using immediate OpenGL functions is sloooow
If you really want good performance then use a display list or ARB_vertex_buffer_object

I would like to add, that other than that you are indeed correct.
BFC simply skips the rasterization of the triangles... everything else is still done (T&L, clipping, that sort of stuff).
And just turning it on should give results... if rasterization is the bottleneck, which it isn't in your code, as pointed out above.