- you have very few objects
- you have very few virtual functions
If you have a lot of objects or a lot of virtual functions, things will be less likely to fit in cache which will entirely destroy your performance, by an order of magnitude when compared to a mostly-always-branch-predicted indirection.
I remember experimenting with a an "inlined" version of std:: function and just having inlined the 5 ctor/move ctor/copy ctor/assignment operators was already slower than the vtable version when going through hundreds of callbacks ; imagine for something like Qt where QWidget or QGraphicsItem have 20+ virtual methods.