The Leadwerks 3 vegetation system is being designed to side-step the bottlenecks that limited the Leadwerks 2 vegetation system. The Leadwerks 2 system involved large collections of 4x4 matrices for each instance, resulting in hundreds of megs of data stored with the map. Eliminating this data results in small map sizes and reduction of memory usage.

Here we have 10,000 trees being rendered (with no billboards), for a total geometry count of 14 million polygons. Memory usage is...zero!

The framerate for this is 130 in debug and release mode, which tells me it's hitting the ceiling on the GPU vertex shader. Obviously we will use billboards to reduce the polygon count, but this tells me we're on the right track.