I’m painting the same object/same materail 1000 times with DrawMesh and I’m getting 1000 draw calls for it. With game objects you’d get just one so I find that surprising.
Which makes Graphics.DrawMesh useless, so how do I get just one?
It looks like with DrawMesh you lose batching.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/58755-Draw-Batching-with-Graphics.DrawMesh
As mentioned in the link, you could combine all of your meshes into a single mesh before calling DrawMesh. I was playing with an app concept that had 1000 game object on the iPad which could not be batched. For one experiment, I replacing my game object with meshes and DrawMesh(). I saw near zero improvement in performance.