I wanted to share some of my latest hacks to improve performance on landscape materials.
I did away with any and all layer blends and replaced them by manually controlling the layer samples.
The setup is a bit harsh, but I ended up gaining upwards of 30fps.
Playing with the layers is a bit complicated, but as a general rule of thumb you start with a “nothing” and invert it so it’s full. Then mix it with a grass layer (add). this is usually the base, from here on, you subtract nothing layer again as the last step of every new layer you add, and you play with subtracting chains to obtain the masks, the material blends, and, most importantly, the procedural grass.
This also allows to arbitrarily paint grass types without having to paint textures.
Which means you could overlay different custom types of grass, or make them exclusive however you see fit…