Performance material instances

Development Rendering
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1

Hello, please give a detailed response on the use of performance master materials. What is a more productive one master material and a few instances of it or just use some master materials? Is it enough just to consider the shader complexity?

Is there any difference in in-game performance of using material instances rather than default master materials? It’s all clear about switches, but what about simple materials, for example with default PBR textures + some small tweaks?

2

To be honest, there is little difference in actual performance. By going master material with many instances you may save some memory, as opposed to several separate materials, but otherwise there is not much of benefit. Quite often though, it is just convenient to have one or several large materials.