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Texture Baking - Trading VRAM for GPU performance

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Jan Mróz

Proposed by Jan Mróz

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Description

Texture Baking - Trading VRAM for GPU performance is Jan Mróz's case study baking a procedural Shader Graph rock material into a static albedo texture. The runtime shader used bevel edge detection on normals, triplanar wood and mud, and dozens of texture samples that left Nsight reporting extreme texture fetch stalls at 1440p on an RTX 3060.

He duplicates the graph into a UV-space baking shader, renders through a CommandBuffer and editor window, dilates seams, swaps in a lightweight lit material, and confirms roughly 4.5x faster rendering while spending about 5.3 MB VRAM per baked rock.

Advanced Unity technical artists who can edit generated shader code and build editor tooling will reproduce the workflow. The technique suits static looks rather than time-varying procedural effects.

Step-by-step code for baking, saving PNGs, and dilation ships in the free proceduralpixels.com article.

Texture baking for VRAM-bandwidth relief is a recurring Procedural Pixels pattern when stylised materials outgrow real-time sample counts.