Unity Preformance with Lights

Unity Engine
1

I notice that Lights have a hit on Preformance. Is it more Efficient to use a large light covering the entire level or a few smaller lights.

2

There are a lot of factors that can play into that.

  1. Are you using Deferred Rendering in Unity 3 or forward Rendering. Deferred Rendering costs performance based upon the number of pixels a light affects, so many small lights are pretty cheap.

  2. If by a few large lights, you mean directional lights, then it will almost always be cheaper to use a few directional lights than many point lights, no matter how much screen space they take up.

3

Is Lightmapping The Most Effiecient

4

yes cause it means no lights at all, its all static