iOS Standard Shader in v5.3

We are thinking about enabling the optimized version for low-end iOS devices in Unity 5.4. A final decision for this hasn't been made yet. The main reason why we didn't do it so far is because in our measurements the performance benefits of these optimizations are smaller on PowerVR SGX GPUs compared to typical ES 2.0 GPUs on Android (e.g. Mali 400). And the optimizations don't come for free, there may be be artifacts.

Other optional optimizations (to disable specular highlights and environment reflections per Standard Shader Material) should hopefully make it into Unity 5.4.

 

I'm assuming that you mean "better" in terms of rendering performance .
I have not done any measurements with exactly that setup (Legacy Diffuse vs Standard Shader with only Albedo texture). But I'm expecting the Legacy Diffuse shader to be cheaper. "Legacy Bumped Specular" vs "Standard Shader with Android Optimizations" should be close.

 

I agree that some best practices would be nice, but it is not so easy to do (and maintain) if you factor in more than just performance.

The mobile shaders should still be best in terms of rendering performance (if fragment shader is your bottleneck) and thus also power.
If you are targeting low-end devices then using the Standard Shader for everything will be too slow.

The Standard Shader has more expensive fragment programs and newer devices tend to have very high res screens. This means that when heavily using the Standard Shader on mobile you most likely shouldn't render at native resolution.