Introduction

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 where a shader needs to be optimized, or maybe it needs to use less textures but produce the same effect. As a technical artist or shader programmer, you have to understand these core fundamentals to optimize your shaders so that you can increase the performance of your game while still achieving the same visual fidelity. Having this knowledge can also help in setting the way in which you write your shader from the start. For instance, by knowing that the game built using your shader will be played on a mobile device, we can automatically set all our lighting functions to use a half vector as the view direction or set all of our float variable types to fixed or half. These, and many other techniques, all contribute to your shaders running efficiently on your target hardware. Let's begin our journey and start learning...