Instanced Meshs: Number vs Tri Count

[feanix]

So me and a buddy were talking about vertex paintable mesh instances. He was saying how the tesselation needed to paint effectively seems like a waste of tris. I pointed out that its better to have a single, highpoly, vertex paintable mesh than lots of low poly, unique, unpaintable ones. We're disagreeing on that point. Is the impact of rendering every consecutive instanced mesh after the first one really negligible or not really?

TL;DR: Is the impact of rendering every consecutive instanced mesh after the first one really negligible or not really?

[darthviper107]

Instancing is useful for memory management. So no, the rendering cost of an instanced mesh is not negligible. It just means you can display more meshes if they don't each individually have to be loaded into memory.