LESSON 04
Instancing
5000 cubes share one geometry, one material, one draw call via drei's <Instances>. Toggle Use <Instances> off in the leva panel to render the same scene as 5000 individual meshes — feel the difference. Toggle <PerformanceMonitor> (always wrapped around the canvas) drops the pixel ratio when FPS dips, restoring it on recovery.
Switching off instancing mounts 5000 <mesh> JSX nodes — each becomes a draw call, a fiber tree node, and a unique geometry/material instance. Reconciliation alone takes hundreds of milliseconds. The GPU-side cost is even worse on integrated graphics.