Dynamic flow control in materials

[Maximum-Dev]

@;562683

@Maximum-Dev Generally, it works by skipping instructions, that are not required. For example, in a landscape you want to have 8 layers with triplannar projection. If you try to have all 8 at the same component at the same time, the performance will be quite low. With dynamic branching you can skip sampling unnecessary textures, that are fully covered by another textures. Alternative example would be having 16 layers with POM on a single component, which is not realistic without multi-pass or dynamic branching.

I see now. I have been primarily working with landscapes in UE4 since 2015 and always struggling with performance. Even with simple shaders and few textures the cost per component is usually higher than expected. Skipping the instructions where it’s not needed should be a #1 issue that needs to be sorted out.