Muliple Entity vs Single Surface

I have a scene with 500 x 200 Poly trees in it.I create each tree from a source mesh and use copyentity. I have also created the same scene using sswifts "addmeshtosurface" function and I get no noticible speed ups....

Does this mean that copyentity retains the surface information so that multiple copies still use the same surface???

No, I think Mark answered this one before. I don't absolutely recall his answer, but I think it amounted to "CopyEntity can be quick, but it's not guaranteed to be". I don't know for sure if it varies on different computers/videocards or whether it varies depending on how you use it.

Combining surfaces yourself manually gives me a lot of speed improvement every time I've done it.