This will help a lot.  If you consider the extreme case, you could render 10000 cubes or combine the 10000 cubes into one large "geometry".  The single draw call will perform waaay better for three reasons: less JNI overhead, the card only has to work on 1 operation so its queue isn't being flooded, and the CPU has much more free time to do other things while the card is processing (instead of continuing to queue OpenGL commands).

I've found that vbo's and vertex arrays can scale reasonably well up to 100,000 polygons in a shape and not do terribly. At that point, though, vbos really do better than vertex arrays and you'll still only be able to render a couple of them at a decent framerate but it'd be even harder to make 100,000 or 10,000 draw calls in a frame.


You would need to limit it to trees nearby so you could still benefit from frustum culling.  If you trees have different textures, you'll have to figure out how to combine them into a single texture that you can activate when drawing the clustered geometry.

Yeah, I thought about that, it would be stupid to spend more memory and disk space in storing/loading another obj with data I already have ready to use .

Thank you both for the info .