Yeah, parsing text with a state machine is slow. Parsing, say, HTTP at that speed would be impressive without SIMD. But this is a binary file full of fixed size

Yeah, parsing text with a state machine is slow. Parsing, say, HTTP at that speed would be impressive without SIMD. But this is a binary file full of fixed sized structures, hence my confusion. Anyway, the answer is there, it's actually measuring the performance of sending the mesh to openGL, to the GPU, and getting a frame rendered.