Testing level 2
Same scene and base material as above. This test is to evaluate the difference between an opaque polygonal representation of many blades of grass, vs a mostly alpha based representation. To complete this task I created a very graphic and simple representation of a grass blade from a 1x4 polygon plane. shaped it as a grass blade and then duplicated and aligned it as if it were a plane. Then made an Alpha Texture which was of the exact same shape and applied it to a single 1x4 polygon plane scaled to the exact same size as the collection I’d just made. This means that when using them the two examples will have the exact same number of grass blades and the exact same look. Below are the results
Polygon tester:
Low Poly w/ Alpha
512x 512 alpha (Masked Material)
3 planes 4 quads each (total 24 triangles)
In overdraw mode 1/2 of the screen is white rest is red or green
4.99k instances
FPS 76-77
High Poly NO Alpha
Opaque material
216 trianlge set of grass blades with same alignment as above.
Overdraw mode 1/3rd of screen is green, rest is dark blue.
4.99k instances
FPS 77-79
Despite being 9X more polygons, the grass clusters with no opacity change were mildly faster. The one thing I did notice though was that baking lighting was about 3x longer on the higher poly test, outside of this however it was faster.
Small note: if anyone wonders why I’m doing this, it’s because I wasn’t satisfied with the information I was finding on the subject. I wanted conclusive test data, and updated to the current version, since bug fixes and methods change over time. My card is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti. Not top of the line… but fine for a consistent test. 
Next test is speed levels for translucent shaders (how can I speed it up… any suggestions here?) and comparing looks between a faked opaque texture.