Animated Billboard or Animated Model?

[system]

I need to have about 800 animated little figures within view at a time for a sort of puzzle game. I believe I have two options: 1. Use billboarding with animated textures/materials drawn on 800 planes. 2. Use 800 ultra low poly models which use traditional rigged animation.

What will end up being faster?

If I use option 1, I believe it'll end up being a whole lot of Draw calls, but I'm not sure. Not all of the little figures are the same, so there may be a huge load for duplicating/modifying the materials. (I do use tiling of the animation frames on the same texture)

If I use option 2, the number of polygons per rigged model will have to be really small! Like 250 polygons. That isn't a whole lot of detail... but will it be faster?

What do you think? Should I go with animating a billboard or animating a 3d model?

Thanks! Brett

[Bravini]

I haven't tested much about this kind of performance measures, but in my projects I find to be much more costly using lots of animations than many small objects grouped in a gameobject with combineChildren script which can greatly improve speed http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Optimizing%20Graphics%20Performance.html. Depending on what kind of puzzle you want, you could also use particles with billborading with self destruct off.

[DaveA]

Try both and post your results here please