Static Batching slower than combining

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

In a recent project for android we had a 9000 billboard trees using a custom shader and without static batching 1 tree = 2 tris = 1 drawcall, with static batching all trees were batched into a single combined mesh/drawcall. our performance was acceptable but on a whim we went ahead and combined the trees into 10 meshes without static batching and our performance went up quite a lot.

I’m guessing its to do with all the culling the static batching does? But in my head static batching should have been quicker because it is basically doing the same thing, combining the objects, but also allows culling.

Anyone got any other ideas on why static batching was slower?

2

Most likely culling performance went up. If you have the profiler available, see how long camera culling takes. With static batching, the engine culls constantly, at an individual object level, where with merging geometry, this is significantly reduced.