Does Godot 4.x do automatic 3D batching / instancing?

This is a READ-ONLY snapshot of the Godot Community Forums when TwistedTwigleg was the owner, which is hosted for archival reasons only. The current Godot Community Forums can be found here.

Some links may point to external websites, including the current Godot Community Forums. These websites are not associated with TwistedTwigleg.

Does Godot 4.x do automatic 3D batching / instancing?

rooke

Hi,

I am getting a lot of conflicting information if Godot is doing automatic batching / instancing of similar mesh+shader objects in 4.0+.
The official documentation talks about how MultiMesh(Instances) are used to achieve GPU batching, but also mentions "[...] In 3D, we still aim to minimize draw calls and state changes. However, it can be more difficult to batch together several objects into a single draw call. [...]" here (see 3D batching) and another blog post about 4.0 improvements from 2021: "[...]Instancing is used to render similar objects (mesh, material and misc settings), reducing the pressure over the rendering API.[...]" (see here) which doesn't mention the need to use MultiMesh(Instances).

The documentation about instancing is a bit confusing and scattered around GitHub, blog posts and the official documentation.

I couldn't find any related commits to the mentioned blog posts easily and even the provided information is very sparse / vague. From my own obersvations Godot 4.x does some form of automatic batching but it would be nice to see how this system could be supported / what prevents this automatic batching.

Thank you for your help 🙂

Megalomaniak

Since 4.0 isn't finalized it's safe to assume that the documentation isn't either. But it also means this might be a good time to bring this up on the documentation issue tracker. Perhaps the documentation on this can be improved before 4.0 stable launches.