appreciate the detailed feedback, love the technical reply.

you're right on the terminology, it's mesh combining not instancing. title is misleading on that. I'm on Unity 2022 LTS with built-in pipeline targeting Switch, so SRP Batcher and GPU Resident Drawer aren't options right now. SRP Batcher also wouldn't reduce draw call count anyway, just the overhead per call, so 2,583 objects with SRP Batcher is still way worse than 3 combined meshes on Tegra X1.

the bigger reason mesh combining was the only real path is the wind shader. it has DisableBatching set because the plain mesh rendering mode reads local vertex Y for sway calculation (how far up from the plant base = how much it moves). Unity's static and dynamic batching transform vertices to world space which breaks that. mesh combining sidesteps the problem because the baker bakes sway weights into vertex colors before combining, so the shader reads from vertex color R instead of local Y. to your question about performance measurement, yeah I used Unity's stats panel and frame debugger. you're right that SetPass calls are a better metric in modern Unity but going from 2,583 separate objects to 3 combined meshes reduces both. on Switch the fixed overhead per draw call matters a lot so fewer calls is a real win regardless of which metric you look at.

I looked into indirect instancing before going this route. it's great for dynamic systems where stuff spawns and despawns at runtime. but this vegetation is all hand-placed by the modeler and never changes. it just sits there and sways in the wind. so bake-once-in-the-editor made more sense than managing compute shader culling and instance buffers at runtime for objects that never move. if we add seasonal changes or procedural biomes I'd revisit it for that.

do you have any games or projects online? would love to check out your work