To use or not to use foliage ?

Hello,

I was looking in my game scene, thinking what I could optimise when I found this:

What we see there is the shader complexity for 2 identical meshes (a tree, same materials). The only difference is that the one on the left is place using foliage and the one one the right is just dragged and dropped from content browser.

Here is how they look in unlit mode:

This suggests that the engine needs to do a lot more work to renter foliage then it does to render static meshes.
Is that true ? Why is the material on the left (same material), more complex ?

Please someone answer this. I have same problem - static meshes are dark green to red in shader complexity, while the same mesh in landscape foliage mode is totally white. It doesn’t make sense - even opaque meshes like tree trunks are shown like they would be transparent. No point uploading more screenshots - above pictures make it clear.

Please someone answer this. I have same problem - static meshes are dark green to red in shader complexity, while the same mesh in landscape foliage mode is totally white. It doesn’t make sense - even opaque meshes like tree trunks are shown like they would be transparent. No point uploading more screenshots - above pictures make it clear.