I tried a few ways of adjusting materials to try and get sprite components to batch draw with Spine scenes but it seems like they are forced to draw on their own draw call batches?
It seems same issue is with GUI nodes.
Is there any hope when Spine is its own extension that sprites/Spine with same material could possibly be drawn together?
I wonder if this is a hard constraint or something arbitrary? I don’t know how they work with rendering in the engine yet but would be interesting to learn / read the source.
No idea You need to measure it. A spine component is “heavier” than a sprite, but I honestly don’t think it will have a huge impact. But that’s just a guess!
This has been my experience too. Basic Spine doesn’t add a lot compared to Sprite (and as it batches better it might actually improve your performance), the hits to performance usually comes from advanced features such as skinning.