Optimize a level - Less meshes but all different or more repeated meshes?

[Ivan84]

Suppose i have 2 towns in a level and i use a mesh (with only 1 material applied to it) to build the walls around them.
The first town has the wall mesh repeated 3 times and the second town has the same mesh repeated 2 times (i have mountains around the towns so i don't need a lot of walls).

Is it better to create 2 bigger meshes having 2 draw calls in total but having 2 different meshes in the memory or having the same mesh repeated 5 times having 5 draw calls but only one mesh in the memory?

In my level i can reduce from 26 draw calls to 9 draw calls if i create bigger meshes but i don't know if this can be a good idea.
How much space in memory do a mesh with 300 vertexes requires compared to another one with 1200?

[darthviper107]

It might depend on which device you're working on. On iPad 2 I've got a scene with a set of chairs instanced like 60 times and it runs great.

[Ivan84]

Thank you for the answer.
I work on ipad 2, i don't think i will be able to make my game optimized to run on ipad 1 too.
I have 185 static meshes in my level and i have an average of 40 static meshes visible in every view (with a min of 10 and a maximum of 80) but i have 40 fps now and in some moments it drops under 35 so i'm trying to reduce the draw calls (that take 30 ms of time each frame), but i don't know if this will overload too much the memory.

[darthviper107]

I don't think the memory is that much of an issue. I was actually to a point where I was turning up lightmap resolution just because I could.

Things that can slow it down more though are things like normal maps and specular highlights, it can improve it quite a bit to reduce those if you have them.

[Ivan84]

I don't have them at all now, and it seems that i won't be able to use them, at least in this level i'm creating.