To follow up on this, we have found that we can get beyond the limit of 8,000 but ONLY in terms of a mesh. That is, we can combine the meshes of many objects into a single mesh. For example, we put 1,000 cubes in one mesh and duplicated this object 1,000 times, netting 1,000,000 cubes on screen at 90 FPS. Interacting with each object is a matter of translating data between world space and mesh space. We can also color the cubes with vertex coloring, which suits our needs.