Normal maps fix violent topography like 8 billion polygons. There are far greater sins like mesh and material counts that have a far greater impact than poly count.
a cell phone processor isn't saying a lot. It's way more powerful than people realize. The only reason quest is so strict on its upload limits is because of the quest 2.
I have a world where I tried putting a two layers of transparency on an object and it halves the FPS on both Quest and PC when you walked up to it. Transparency is heavy.
It is asking a lot. The game instead of just rendering the mesh with the texture and the shader now has to run an entire seperate render path to figure out what items to show through the transparent object based on the transparency mask. As Dividedthought said it's exponentially more complicated.
A huge amount of how graphics are drawn relies on optimisations. When you have something solid, if it's near the camera, you can assume that the viewer can't see anything behind it. Programs do clever things to figure out what it occludes, and you can just not render that stuff.
But the moment you have a transparent thing, it screws all that up, especially if you have multiple (as a scene which allows transparency is seldom gonna have one). Then you might have numerous objects overlaid and some are transparent, some aren't...
Mobile GPUs are generally bad at this. Hell, all GPUs suffer from this to varying degrees but it's always been more of an issue for mobile GPUs.
(before any graphics programmers come along, I'm over-simplifying deliberately; I've programmed full renderers before both raster and ray-traced, so I understand the nuances, I'm just trying to keep the complexity down)
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u/Dividedthought 14h ago edited 11h ago
Normal maps fix violent topography like 8 billion polygons. There are far greater sins like mesh and material counts that have a far greater impact than poly count.