@Robert Guetzkow (rjg) Shouldn't blender simply ignore geometry with scale (0,0,0) ? it seems completely absurd that an object completely invisible is affecting performance right?

Having invisible objects slowing down performance may be frustrating for users not aware of this "issue" ?

In T85216#1104051, @NoobiePoopsie (helloidonthaveanyideaformyusername) wrote:

@Robert Guetzkow (rjg) Shouldn't blender simply ignore geometry with scale (0,0,0) ? it seems completely absurd that an object completely invisible is affecting performance right?

Having invisible objects slowing down performance may be frustrating for users not aware of this "issue" ?

It's not absurd, that data still exists in the instance buffers and still goes through the pipeline. Not 100% sure on Cycles but for Eevee and Workbench: When batches of instances are submitted to be drawn by the GPU it doesn't need to know anything about their transforms in the world from the CPU point of view, it just points to a buffer of transforms, geometry and tells the GPU to draw x number of tris i number of times with a single draw call, everything unique about the instance is applied in the vertex shader by addressing into the buffer by the instance index. This is why drawing these instances are faster than drawing objects, which blender has to set up drawing for individually. The only performance saved from a scale of zero would likely be due to the fact they don't rasterize any pixels and don't have to execute the fragment shader, the vertex shader still has to happen regardless.

From a technical standpoint I completely understand, but from a user standpoint that might create a lot of confusion? Isn't it?
Couldn't geonode instancing node just skip elements with (0,0,0) scale attr?