Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Avoid texture thrashing

In the rare event that too much texture data is loaded into VRAM, and the required texture is not present, the GPU will need to request it from RAM and overwrite one or more existing textures to make room for it. This is likely to worsen over time as the memory becomes fragmented, and it introduces a risk that the texture just flushed from VRAM needs to be pulled again within the same frame. This will result in a serious case of memory thrashing and should be avoided at all costs.

This is less of a concern on modern consoles such as the PS4, Xbox One, and Wii U since they share a common memory space for both CPU and GPU. This design is a hardware-level optimization, given the fact that the device is always running ...