Example: One wants to render a 100,000 x 100,000 grid. For the sake of argument the grid cannot be loaded as a model and must be manually created during runtime, i.e. a nested for-loop.

Obviously instancing would be the fastest way to render this. But is it better to create a 10×10 mesh and instance it 100,000,000 times, or is it faster to create a 10,000×10,000 mesh and instance it 100 times?

There’s the cost of the draw call to consider but there’s also the initial startup cost of generating the mesh.