Is there a way to make a surface appear perforated without actually splitting the surface?

Dear All,

I’m working on a project that requires a lot of perforations across all the surfaces, in order for me to do renders and/or shadow studies. I’m working on just a small segment of the scheme (that will be turned into a block instance) with 16GB RAM capacity, but there is an awful lot of lag when trying to rotate around the object.

Is there a way of applying a texture to the perforations on the surface so I’m not having to split the surface to get light through, and therefore reducing the file size? I will end up needed quite a few of these surfaces across my project (more than 200 instances)

Thanks for your help

Chyna