[quote:3u2ngezv]"I wasn't aware that the tint effect would impact performance"
Anything can affect performance ; whilst tools like C2 are quite high-level, in terms of abstraction, understanding how it works internally can be useful to explain why things are the way they are.
Basically, by having unique sets of shader attributes per instance, you prevent the system from batching similar objects. The hardware is very efficient at processing large amount of identical data ; the more you make the data unique, the more the objects have to be broken down into smaller groups, each generating drawcalls with specific render settings and shader parameters.
It's much faster to render 10.000 triangles with the same attributes than 1000 triangles with unique attributes ; in the second case, you spend most of your CPU/GPU time in the pre-render stages and the driver overhead.
There's always a trade-off between CPU/GPU time and memory/video memory, and a balance to find between these. If you don't need to dynamically colour sprites, just bake predefined colours into texture atlases ; you'll burn a bit of memory, but the geometry will be quick to process.
There isn't a universally "better" way of doing this, it all depends on the application and the external requirements.