koobas.hobune.stream
Same texture in different materials performance
Does it improve performance to use the same texture in different materials. For instance if I use the same bark texture for distant trees with a different material or would it give better performance to use a lower resolution texture?
Multiple different materials increase the drawcalls ammount ( which isn't that good for cpu) , but dont worry it can handle quite a few.
Having the same texture , say 2048×2048 on multiple materials would save GPU memory , as it has to load that texture once , it also saves disk space.
Distant objects textures are automatically resized to a lower resolution.
Having the same texture will reduce memory usage, not necessarily the performance. If the total memory from the number of textures and mesh data take up less space than is locally available at the GPU, there should not be any problem. However , if this memory usage exceeds the GPU limit then your performance will start going down.
Static batching , is used to significantly reduce draw calls if you have the same material applied to stationary objects.( But this is only available in Unity Pro)
Please take a look at the following doc for ways to optimize performance:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/OptimizingGraphicsPerformance.html
