First of all my question is: How much needed is culling in general ? 2D Tilemap based game in this case.
I’ve been using the libgdx SpriteCache and I cache a whole layer and later draw it - by itself you cannot clip/cull it since its one big mesh; Via SpriteBatch its easy since you just stop drawing them at some point.
So I guess the solution is to seperate the cache into chunks and thereby cull it. Of course small enough chunks defeat the purpose of the SpriteCache.
but yeah bottom line: if I send a mesh like that to the GPU where like 80% of the mesh is not within frustum anyway, doesnt the driver/GPU does some sort of culling anway ?
How costly is it to draw something which is not on screen ?