Does material texture's manipulations redone every frame, or its baked into separate texture?

For example, i dont have “Dynamic” parameters inside Material, and i manipulate existing texture with various pixel functions before pass to Base Color, is UE4 smart enaugh to bake such textures with all manipulations done?

Should i prepare textures inside Photoshop (for example) for better performance as much as possible, or Material can bake such manipulations into new persistent texture?

Hi newbprofi -

Everything you do in the Material Editor counts toward the CPU and GPUs processing of a particular material. So, for instance, if you have a Texture and use the Power expression to increase the contrast and the multiply expression to increase the brightness of said texture then you are adding the math calculations of those nodes to your material’s render expense. In most instances this is a minor hit to the rendering power, but could on say a mobile platform mean the difference of being able to get the look you are after or not.

If you find yourself adding these expressions into a large number of your materials (whatever your expressions happen to be), then it might be a good idea to adjust the base texture to make it work without these expressions. Of course there are also times when this is not the ideal way to do things, specifically if you are using one texture multiple different ways.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

As i thought thx.