Prefab performance question

Unity Engine
1

So, I have a village.

In this village are a bunch of different huts.

I have prefabs of each hut and populated the village with these. I also have furniture in some of those huts… also prefabs.

Now I’m making a prefab of the whole village and handing it off to someone else.

I know there’s an issue with prefabs within a prefab. Where I can no longer make a change to those hut prefabs and have them automatically change all the huts anymore, since it’s now in another prefab. Same goes with the furniture.

What I want to know is… is there really any performance benefit with prefab use? Before I thought it helped since they’re all pointing to the same object, and reduces memory requirements and draw calls. But with the batching that is built into Unity 3.0, does that negate that? Am I perfectly fine just dragging objects in straight from the source object instead of creating a prefab for it?

2

Prefabs are just a convenience, they have nothing to do with performance.

–Eric

3

Although making your world with prefabs is a good design choice which can lead to good performance, but only if you’re using unity pro / static / occlusion culling etc.