A colleague and I are talking about how scenes are typically rendered in complex games. He believes the world is rendered recursively in the truest object-oriented fashion, with the world's many actors each overriding a virtual function like Actor.Draw() (e.g. Koopa.Draw(), Goomba.Draw()).
By contrast, I imagined that complex games today would iterate over their scene graph, avoiding virtual function overhead and allowing more flexibility for specialized iterators (e.g. near-to-far vs. far-to-near, skipping certain objects in the tree, etc.) And my experience with OpenGL and DirectX suggested to me that they tend to draw objects in batch, and passing a batch context through a recursive call (i.e. the batch into which a class's Draw() function would draw) seemed like additional parameter-passing overhead that could be avoided with iteration.
Is one method favored over another nowadays? If so, why?