Chapter 9: Mobile Shader Adjustment

In the next two chapters, we are going to take a look at making the shaders that we write performance-friendly for different platforms. We won't be talking about one platform in particular, but we are going to break down the elements of shaders that we can adjust to make them more optimized for mobile and efficient on any platform in general. These techniques range from understanding what Unity offers in terms of built-in variables that reduce the overhead of the shader's memory to learning about the ways in which we can make our shader code more efficient.

Learning the art of optimizing your shaders will come up in just about any game project that you work on. There will always come a point in any production environment where a shader needs to be optimized, or maybe it needs to use fewer textures but produce the same effect. As a technical artist or shader programmer, you have to understand these core fundamentals to optimize your...