No it isn't, I'm talking about avoiding render computation, and then therefore the diffing. If 1 render method gets called that contains 10 elements, and 99 oth

No it isn't, I'm talking about avoiding render computation, and then therefore the diffing. If 1 render method gets called that contains 10 elements, and 99 other render methods are not called because of returning false from shouldComponentUpdate, that is very different than 1 render method getting called with 1000 elements, and it is not just in the constants.