Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Using baked lightmaps

Baking lighting and shadowing into a scene is significantly less processor-intensive than generating them at runtime. The downside is the added application disk footprint, memory consumption, and potential for memory bandwidth abuse. Ultimately, unless a game's lighting effects are being handled exclusively through the legacy Vertex-Lit Shading format or through a single DirectionalLight instance, then it should probably include lightmapping somewhere to make some huge budget savings on lighting calculations. Relying entirely on real-time lighting and shadows is a recipe for disaster due to the performance costs they are likely to inflict.

Several metrics can affect the cost of lightmapping, however, such as their resolution, ...