You can easily create a test yourself. I checked my geom count while using show/hide. Then I check it using detach/reparent.
The latter was much lower in geom count. I think hide just tells the GPU an object should not be rendered, but the object still goes down the graphics pipeline.
When you use detach, you are in fact taking an object out of the scene graph (which is taking it out of the game world). Only objects inside the scene graph get sent to the GPU.
Looking at it that way…it does make sense.
Not to mention, my test was accurate because I knew I had a certain number of items that were attached to render, but were hidden. When I detached those items, the geom count dropped based on the number of items.
I’m now looking for more ways to shrink the geom count if possible. This is harder to do for me since I’m developing an RTS style game.
But hey, I’ll take 200+ geoms over 700+ any day.
Yeah, that’s how big of a drop I had when I started using detach. 