Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Reducing the polygon count

Reducing the polygon count is the most obvious way to gain performance and should always be considered. In fact, since we cannot batch objects using skinned mesh renderers, it's one of the good ways of reducing CPU and GPU runtime overhead for animated objects.

Reducing the polygon count is simple, straightforward, and provides both CPU and memory cost savings for the time required for artists to clean up the mesh. In this day and age, much of an object's detail is almost entirely based on detailed texturing and complex shading, so we can often get away with stripping away a lot of vertices on modern meshes, and most users would be unable to tell the difference.