This page contains information on optimizing your shadersA program that runs on the GPU. More info
See in Glossary for runtime performance, especially on mobile platforms that have limited GPU performance.
To avoid complex calculations, do the following for example:
pow
, log
and sin
.normalize
and dot
, instead of writing your own. This ensures that the driver can generate better code.To avoid shaders repeating calculations, do the following for example:
Use half
instead of float
for all variables except world space coordinates and texture coordinates. For more information, refer to Use 16-bit precision in shaders.
Unity doesn’t support suffixes, so a value like 2.0h
becomes a full float
. This means when the GPU does calculations, it might have to convert other values to float
and back. This can slow down the shader.
To prevent this, use casts instead of suffixes. For example, use half(2.0)
instead of 2.0h
.
To avoid shaders slowing down, avoid the following resource-intensive methods:
discard
method in the fragment shader.To ensure mobile GPUs can use early depth testing to speed up rendering, don’t write to the depth bufferA memory store that holds the z-value depth of each pixel in an image, where the z-value is the depth for each rendered pixel from the projection plane. More info
See in Glossary in the fragment shader.
For more information about depth testing, refer to ShaderLab command: ZTest.
Did you find this page useful? Please give it a rating:
Thanks for rating this page!
What kind of problem would you like to report?
Thanks for letting us know! This page has been marked for review based on your feedback.
If you have time, you can provide more information to help us fix the problem faster.
Provide more information
You've told us this page needs code samples. If you'd like to help us further, you could provide a code sample, or tell us about what kind of code sample you'd like to see:
You've told us there are code samples on this page which don't work. If you know how to fix it, or have something better we could use instead, please let us know:
You've told us there is information missing from this page. Please tell us more about what's missing:
You've told us there is incorrect information on this page. If you know what we should change to make it correct, please tell us:
You've told us this page has unclear or confusing information. Please tell us more about what you found unclear or confusing, or let us know how we could make it clearer:
You've told us there is a spelling or grammar error on this page. Please tell us what's wrong:
You've told us this page has a problem. Please tell us more about what's wrong:
Thank you for helping to make the Unity documentation better!
Your feedback has been submitted as a ticket for our documentation team to review.
We are not able to reply to every ticket submitted.