Vertex normals and face normals

Unity Engine
1

Are the normals that I get from an object vertex normals or face normals ?

2

Its vertex normal in vertexshader

3

Any realtime models are typically stored with vertex normals. Face normals are not stored at all in all cases I’ve seen. This is also the case in Unity.

This way a triangle simply consists of three indices into an array of vertices. All further information is stored per vertex. (Position, normal, tangent, uv’s and colors.)

The only way to obtain a face normal would be to use geometry shaders and calculate it based on vertex positions. (Available on limited platforms of course.)