I am in unreal engine 5.1 and noticing my instruction and texture sample counts seem wrong like they aren’t calculating correctly… With an empty material with nothing hooked up i get the following…
Base pass shader : 211 instructions
Base pass vertex shader : 263 instructions
Texture samplers 2/16
Texture Lookups (Est.): VS(0), PS(3)
Shader Count : 4
Is this normal? Any ideas how to fix if not?
I believe there is a known issue with instruction counts, but even an empty material still has a cost and requires instructions - so it may be correct or not as far off as you would expect.
The values dont seem to change when i start adding multiplying of 2 different colors…
That doesn’t really mean anything. Not every node will necessarily increase instruction count because of built-in optimizations.
i guess not but often it seems like things that should be more expensive are less… and other times more…
Build a complicated material, and you’ll find it’s more expensive in the end than a simple one. Instruction count is a pretty small part of performance. Texture memory and bandwidth will be a bottleneck long before instruction counts on the majority of projects.
Try to do things with as few instructions as possible, but I wouldn’t obsess over it.
A simple transparent material can be several times more expensive than an extremely complicated opaque one. Minimizing those types of costs are where I’d focus my energy.