Question by vlldllr · Mar 21, 2014 at 09:10 PM · performance particles optimization shadows shuriken

If you're not using dynamic lighting, is there any performance benefit to turning off cast/receive shadows on shuriken particles?

2D game. No dynamic lights. Lots of particles... Shuriken has Cast/Receive shadows on by default. The tiny OCD part of me wants to go back and uncheck all those boxes, just in case. Is it worth doing that? Or is there seriously no reason whatsoever that there would be no performance gain at all from the exercise?

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supernat · Mar 21, 2014 at 09:39 PM 0

I know this isn't an answer, sorry. It seems like I have looked into this before and found that there is no performance issue if shadows are disabled or you have no dynamic lights, but it wasn't conclusive. I think they default to on, because if you do enable shadows and dynamic lighting, chances are you'll want most everything to cast a shadow. Plus, these values might be used if baking the lighting. If you have time, maybe you can do some tests and provide the results here. I would be curious. Shoot, now I'm getting the urge to go try it. :) $$anonymous$$y gut says you will not get a gain, because the $$anonymous$$m at Unity is pretty bright, and shadows have been there a while. Such a massive leak of performance would have hopefully already been caught.

Benproductions1 · Mar 22, 2014 at 08:23 AM 0

The short answer is: There shouldn't be. And if there is, it's most definitely a bug and should get fixed.

If you're worried about it, do some tests.

Gruffy · Mar 22, 2014 at 12:11 PM 0

I guess you could imagine that somewhere down the pipeline, where the check for this is all bundled up nicely, you might say that not having it checked removes the need to fire the conditional any further beyond the initial check! So, maybe a super tiny amount of performance clawback, but possibly too negligible to even care about. Then again, you never know!? Take care bud Gruffy