I'm creating a new world space for a Skyrim mod and want to know if there is any gains to be had by utilizing same models for a given cell.

For example I've done some anolysis on vanilla Skyrim and lets take the Riverwood04 cell which has a total of 130,000 triangles when adding up all the model within that cell.

My question is would there be any differences if the make up of the models for those poly counts would be any different performance wise, if it was using a lot of the same models? I'm wondering if the gaming engine or video cards have some sort of caching for these, thus if the same models are used it would be better for performance?

Certainly I'm sure for textures that they are cached in some way, but does it actually make a difference when in terms of meshes. Would a cell that is made up of the same model copied 500 times to make a cell triangle count 130,000 be the same if it was comprised of 500 different models for the same count?