What sort of test case? I have used std::vector to take care of memory management and just passed the pointer (myVector.data()) to OpenGL, for example.
In that case, of course, the speed is quite the same. No, I'm talking about a wavelet filter, in particular. No "pointer access", but then access to vector elements by operator[]. That is slower than doing it by pointers directly, even though, in principle, the compiler could optimize everything away. In reality, it does not.