2 different things entierly.
You have to do both to get good performance.
Optimizing the material for performance will involve several things.
- Using UV for all the distance blend, because it’s way, way, way cheaper than blending the whole material layers.
- limiting the samples and layers amounts, on top of using packed textures.
- removing or limiting height blends. Or setting them up manually - off the packed texture. Doing your own can be a lot cheaper.
- Doing your own material layering instead of using the layer nodes. Much more performant if done right.
Side note:
Tessellation can’t be turned off, so leverage it as much as possible.
Overall you can see a difference of over 20fps at 4k on a 1080ti going from the tutorial material everyone starts with to an optimized one…