Performance Tips

intermediate performance

Skybox Plus · Troubleshooting & FAQ

Overview

Skybox Plus shaders are designed for high performance. The actual cost depends on which features you enable in the material.

Cost Breakdown

FeatureTexture fetchesNotes
Procedural Haze3Three samples from the noise texture. Very fast.
Each cubemap layer1One fetch per enabled layer from a 4K cubemap.
Moon texture1One fetch from a 256x256 texture.
Meteor Showers0Math only, no texture fetches.
Rainbow0Math only, no texture fetches.
Star Clustering3Three samples from the noise texture, only while clustering is above zero.
Second Moon1One fetch from the moon texture, only inside the disc of the body.
Aurora Borealisup to 36Samples the noise texture several times per curtain. The shader skips those samples on sky pixels no curtain covers.

In the worst case (Landscape shader, all 7 layers + haze + moon), the shader performs 11 texture fetches from large textures. This can be expensive on mobile devices.

Optimization Tips

  • Use fewer layers - two or three well-chosen cubemap layers often look as good as four. Disable unused layers.
  • Create quality presets - ship 2-3 material variants with different layer counts. Let the player pick a quality level (Best Quality uses all layers, Best Performance uses fewer).
  • Skip night time on mobile - disable Night Time if your game is always daytime. This removes the moon texture fetch and the star calculations.
  • Aurora on mobile - the aurora is the most expensive option. Keep it for night skyboxes, or lower Ray Density to reduce the visual cost of a busy sky.
  • Simpler haze - if you only need cubemap clouds, disable Procedural Haze to save 3 texture fetches.
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