Geometry instancing

In real-time computer graphics, geometry instancing is the practice of rendering multiple copies of the same mesh in a scene at once. This technique is primarily used for objects such as trees, grass, or buildings which can be represented as repeated geometry without appearing unduly repetitive, but may also be used for characters. Although vertex data is duplicated across all instanced meshes, each instance may have other differentiating parameters (such as color, or skeletal animation pose) changed in order to reduce the appearance of repetition. API support Starting in Direct3D version 9, Microsoft included support for geometry instancing. This method improves the potential runtime performance of rendering instanced geometry by explicitly allowing multiple copies of a mesh to be rendered sequentially by specifying the differentiating parameters for each in a separate stream. The same functionality is available in Vulkan core, and the OpenGL core in versions 3.1 and up but may be accessed in some earlier implementations using the EXT_draw_instanced extension. In offline rendering