From what I could gather there is a performance issue, on non tegra mobile devices, with alpha blending (better then cutout but still an issue). Does the hit in performance happen at the moment your shader is defined as transparent and set to blend even if your alpha is 1 (in truth making the object opaque)? Does “blend One One” mode also gives a hit to performance?
Thanks!
My understanding is that transparent shaders have to be rendered after all of the other shaders and then sorted by it’s zbuffer depth. Since you would still be doing this sorting after everything else is rendered you would still have the performance impact of a semi-transparent shader. Use a diffuse shader if you can get away with it.
A transparent shader is always a transparent shader; what you set the alpha to is irrelevant.