Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Reducing mathematical complexity

Complicated mathematics can severely bottleneck the rendering process, so we should do whatever we can to limit the damage. It is entirely possible to store a map of complex mathematical function outputs by precalculating them and placing them as floating-point data in a texture file. A texture file is, after all, just a huge blob of floating-point values that can be indexed quickly with three dimensions: x, y, and color (rgba).

We can feed this texture into the shader and sample the pre-generated table in the shader at runtime instead of completing a complex calculation at runtime.

We may not see any improvement with functions such as sin() and cos() since they've been heavily optimized to make use of GPU ...