Materials, translucency, and overdraw

Diagnose

1. Confirm BasePass, translucency, post, or a material-bound draw is significant in GPU timing.
2. Use Shader Complexity (Alt+8 / viewmode shadercomplexity) to locate expensive pixel regions.
3. Inspect Quad Overdraw/other supported view modes when tiny triangles or repeated coverage is suspected.
4. Isolate the material/primitive/effect and re-capture the same frame.

Shader Complexity primarily visualizes instruction count. It does not reliably price texture fetches, bandwidth, divergent loops, vertex/WPO work, or platform-specific scheduling. Use it to locate suspects, then prove cost with GPU milliseconds.

Levers

• Reduce full-screen or large-screen material coverage before micro-optimizing a tiny object.
• Reduce overlapping translucent/masked layers, particle size, spawn density, and unnecessary sorting.
• Replace translucent effects with opaque/masked/dithered/mesh alternatives only when the visual result and temporal stability remain acceptable.
• Remove unused texture samples/features; move invariant work out of per-pixel paths where supported.
• Bound WPO and stop distant/imperceptible deformation.
• Reduce unique static-switch combinations/permutations; do not convert runtime decisions to static switches without considering compile/package/PSO cost.
• Reduce material slots/sections when submission evidence supports it; preserve authoring flexibility where the measured cost is elsewhere.

Optimize the exact platform permutation and worst visible overlap. Editor shader stats alone are not a shipping GPU measurement.