I have really high draw calls for a pretty simple scene. Without any characters, no grass, and 3 lights I have 457 draw calls. When I put even a small patch of grass, it shoots up to 1117 draw calls! The scene is only 141k tris. I have a scene that is about the same size with 500k tris, with high poly characters with animation, 3 lights and a lot of grass and it only has 879 draw calls with no occlusion culling or objects grouped. Any idea why this other level is crazy high? I tried to place grass with very low opacity and target strength and it jumped to over 2000 draw calls! Any light on this would be really awesome.
Each light in forward rendering will multiply your draw calls. Switch to deferred to fix that, or batch stuff.
Where do I switch to deferred? I checked rendering setting and didn’t see anything for the lighting.
Edit: Found it under player settings, but it did not change my draw calls for some reason.
I tried vertex lit and that dropped it down to about 900 draw calls, but my terrain textures blurred right out.
A few days ago i believe the same mystery happened to a colleague. He set the grass mesh himself with a mesh where you assign the trees instead of letting unity generating the grass meshes and just assigning a texture. With the grass handled “like trees” he easily got over 3500 drawcalls. Deleting the “grass-tree”, assigning just the texture in the foliage tab and we were back to around 350 dcs. BTW 450 is quite a lot for such an “empty” scene, optimizing terrain settings can help a lot there.