Optimized transparent shader?

Unity Engine
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1

I have noticed that using any shader with transparency is causing significant drops in frame rates by half… same affect as enabling shadows in a scene.

I really dont’ see any work-around for this one… I used the default “transparent diffuse” and my frame rates drop from 60 fps to 30… even if this is applied to a scene that has only one object, a camera, and a directional light. (no shadows).

it seems to make no difference how many objects are in the scene (1 to 200), I even tried creating a simple Rim shader with alpha blending… same result.

Is there a specific transparency shader I should be using or some technique I can employ in my custom shaders for this platform to regain some performance?

[edit]

I failed to mention that this is targeting ARM platform (Surface RT specifically with Tegra 3)

2

If it still does it with mobile/alpha then your problem is what you’re rendering and not the shader.

3

I’ve tried a primative sphere from both Maya and Unity with three different shaders, a custom rim shader I made, the default transparent/diffuse, and the mobile/transparent/vertex color shaders… same results.