How heavy are a lot of similar yet different meshes, same materials?

Hey!

I'm thinking of having many different, yet very similar, meshes for a level, so that it doesn't repeat at all. They're normal meshes, and all share the same material. Would this slow down a game in any considerable amount?

Thanks!

 

This should not slow your game at all. In fact, having the same material for many different meshes will allow you to "batch" several meshes to reduce draw calls to your GPU. What you're doing is not bad practice or anything to worry about unless you get undesirable results.

To get some extra savings, mark any objects that will not move as "static" in the upper-right of the inspector, it will allow for some more powerful batching (but will slow your game down a ton if those static objects move!).

If you're especially tech-graphics savvy, and if your meshes are similar enough, you could have 1 large vertex array shared between all of your meshes and use a different array of triangle indices for each mesh.

 

Good to hear! That's what I figured, but since i'm not the best at optimization or understanding what's going on under the hood, I figured I should ask.