Best Practices

Materials are one of the easiest places to spend or save performance. These guidelines all follow from one fact: a unique Material is a compiled shader and a draw bucket.

Prefer instances over new materials

If two surfaces differ only in their values, a color, a roughness, a texture, make them Material Instances of one Material, not two separate Materials.

• Two Materials = two shaders, two buckets.
• One Material + two Instances = one shader, one bucket, two parameter rows.

Design your Material with parameters for everything that varies, then express the variations as instances.

Keep the number of unique materials low

Every unique Material in a scene is another shader to compile and another bucket to draw. A few well-parameterized Materials covering many instances will always beat a pile of one-off Materials.

Choose the cheapest blend mode

Blend mode	Cost
Opaque	Cheapest. Writes depth and culls well. Use it whenever you can.
Masked	A little more than opaque (an alpha test). Good for foliage and fences.
Translucent	Most expensive. It overdraws and writes no depth. Use sparingly.

Transparency is order-independent, so you never sort translucent objects yourself, but it still overdraws. Reach for Masked before Translucent when hard-edged transparency is all you need.

Other tips

• World Position Offset compiles extra vertex shaders for the depth and shadow passes, so enable it only on materials that actually move.
• Two Sided draws every triangle twice, use it only where you need it.
• Turn off Cast Shadows on materials that never need them (decals, tiny props, emissive-only surfaces) to skip them in the shadow passes.
• Sample fewer textures where you can; each one is a fetch per pixel.