Materials - How many samples/instructions is too many? - State of the art

[anonymous_user_5d2d3469]

@MostHost_LA

… just a tip.
if you want to quickly find out what Not to do in materials, make yourself a water material on a mesh with base quads set 1m apart.
Start off with summing basic sine functions, transition into implementing gerstner.

for sake of practicality experiment on default lit, transition to translucent only after you are happy and need to fix the look and bench performance.

You can literally spend well over 3 months trying to get water to look just right and balancing performance.
I believe it really teaches what not to do, since you can get drops of up to 60FPS from adding 1 instruction into the pixel shader…

1 math instruction dropping 60 frames? The only time i could imagine that happening is in ridiculous, unusable resolutions like 32K with 4X SSAA, or with 200 layers of overdraw, and if you have 200 layers of overdraw, you may want to do something slightly different than what you are doing currently.