I think depends on the business requirement. Lots of project's transaction composed by 10 - 30% insert/update and 70% is select clause. By this case, hibernate will faster than pure JDBC, because the data result is cached. (Actually inside HIBERNATE, also calling the JDBC).

But for the high insert/update requirements, I think pure JDBC code, wrapped by DAO will be faster than Hibernate. Of course, for the huge project, maintain lots of DAOs will be a nightmare.

Just my 2cents.