Rendering performance problem

how many is too many? Each square in my game is made up of one text object and 2 graphics objects (one for the white box with a grey border and one for the filled in box that sits in the middle). So if my game grid is 5 x 6 then I’ll have 90 game objects + the keyboard on the bottom is another 28 * 3 so a total of 174.

The weird thing is that everything is “smooth” until the colors and text starts to fill in on row 3 or 4.

I do not clear any graphics before redrawing …
The game works by setting up the scene and calling this.add.X in the create function. Then in my input handler, when a user presses a key, I add more graphic objects to render to show which keys are pressed and if they are correct or not in the puzzle.