I came across one annoying problem recently involving smoothing groups in models. Mainly 3ds max obj exporter problem. Since I will be using obj format for static meshes, the problem is that when exporting from max to obj format it exports everything except smoothing groups, so entire model looks like it uses one for entire model, and as a result it looks like it is completely smoothed out.
Later i found that a way to avoid this problem is to detach parts of the model that use different smoothing groups so there is no issue. But then I am concerned about memory consumption of this since every detached piece of the model has duplicate vertices in places where it would be connected it smoothing groups were working.
For example if you have cube model with 8 vertices, since it looks wrong in the engine, you would detach each side of the cube and have 6 sides with 4 vertices, and there is the problem i am trying to address.
My question here is - can this pose a threat to performance or memory consumption since there might be many static meshes in the scene? This is considering modern day hardware.