It would be great to have LOD level at material editor as static switch. Currently it’s really cumbersome to optimize LOD materials. You need to do everything by hand and this causes bug’s and errors. This way you would easily get rid of detail textures, POM, normal maps etc by just making single material with some switches.
Problem now is that you some how need to keep track of LOD materials and create dublicates of every material instances and keep them sync with original material instances. It’s possible but it’s add just enough pain that most of developers just skip this and performance suffer.
Implementation would be quite easy. Every material would have 4 static switch.(one for each LOD level. Each LOD would set current and all previous lod switchs to be true. If material would not use those LOD switches nothing would happen. It would be completely opaque change and would help performance a lot.