Is multiple objects on top of each other more efficient than 1 object with more tris?

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Hello,

I’m currently working on my first game and have started designing some 3d objects. I know that an increase in tris will affect performance but i’m not sure if an increase of objects that result in the lower number of tris will do the same thing. As an example of what i mean, part of a wall in my game will have some 3d parts seperating it. I could simply design the entire wall as a plane of 2 tris, then have the those separating parts as different object poking through the wall. Or, i could just make it 1 object with a wall and the seperators. But each part of the wall between the seperators will be another 2 tris. There will be quite alot of these seperators so the increase in tris will be quite substantial.

So does having 1 2tri plane behind with many many objects poking thru to create the wall resulting in much less tris more efficient than the 1 object with many more tris? Or would instantiating the increased number of objects result in a different performance drop?

1 Answer

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Poly-counts generally don’t affect performance as much as additional game-objects, unless we’re talking in the way of hundreds to thousands more polygons. However, game-objects don’t typically affect performance much, either. Your best bet would be to find a happy medium, and just make a mesh that actually does this for you, and just not attach the vertices that “overlap” the wall to the wall itself. This way, there’s one object, and the wall still only has two tris, to its side.