Just a heads up , Kolmone found the same deal on the microbrute at Thomann ! Edit its back to 299 . <| sep |> You are right instancing is quite popular , because the bandwidth between CPU and GPU is a huge bottleneck and you want to try to transmit less data as possible . With instancing you only need to upload 3 float for the position , 4 for a quaternion 1 for scale assuming uniform scale and one for the age , but this is not something all engine do . Several engine want to have the flexibility to change every parameter for each vertex , but depends a lot of the types of effect you are creating . For simple particle effect reuploading the whole buffer is sometime easier . If you check unreal 4 hope you have access they support both . F P a r t i c l e S y s t e m S c e n e P r o x y GetObjectPositionAndScale . If you are making a complex effect like a trail reupload of each vertex position and normal is necessary . If you have a huge number of particles some engine nVidia FLEX update everything in compute shader . but he finished the triangle tutorial just now , so looks a bit premature to speak about compute or even instancing .