Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Surface Shaders

Unity's Surface Shaders are a simplified form of fragment shaders, allowing Unity developers to get to grips with shader programming in a more simplified fashion. The Unity Engine takes care of converting our Surface Shader code for us, abstracting away some of the optimization opportunities we have just covered. However, it does provide some miscellaneous values that can be used as replacements, which reduce accuracy but simplify the mathematics in the resulting code. Surface Shaders are designed to handle the general case fairly efficiently, but optimization is best achieved with a personal touch by writing our own shaders.

The approxview attribute will approximate the view direction, saving costly operations. The halfasview ...