Say that you want to repeat a mesh, many times, in a 3D scene. Modern GPUs, including those in smartphones, are very powerful and properly optimized have enormous throughput.
One of the things I wanted to do was put a lot of detail on the planet surface. We wanted to do a game about planet exploration and colonization, with randomly generated maps. The first prototype of what became The Spatials was in full 3D. Faking mesh instancing in OpenGL ES 2.0 14 August, 2014
