I have a material with a shader that supports transparency.
It’s applied to an object that I need to fade in/out, so I animate the color.alpha value (the texture map applied to the material has no alpha).
I know I’m losing performance when the material is transparent due to fill rate issues, but when color.alpha is set to 1.0, will there still be performance issues?
Basically, do transparency-supporting materials/shaders always cause fill-rate slowdowns? Or only when their alpha is less than 1.0?
I’m curious about this, too. If 100% and 0% still cost the same, it might be worth manually swapping them out for opaque when at 100% and disabling renderer when at 0%.
An alpha blended material will still incur a performance cost even if the alpha color is currently 1.0, so yes, if the object in question is opaque most of the time, you could probably save yourself some rendering time by swapping to an opaque material when possible.