Two Mats One Tex

Quick question about texture memory. As I'm not 100% sure about how unity manages textures in memory as regards to materials.

If I have two materials, both using the same texture, will Unity try and load a second texture into memory identical to the first or is it smart enough to not do that? Or will for example this be resolved further down the line, for example will the graphics driver detect its duplicate? - I guess not for the later if its flagged as a new allocation.

Just basically want to know if I have multiple materials referencing the same atlas whether or not I'm going to end up with amount of atlases x materials stored in memory or just one atlas being pointed at by many materials.

 

Unity will just reference the already loaded texture, there is no additional cost when reusing the texture.

 

Thank you, do you have a source for this information?

 

I tested it with the profiler, unity even shows how many references the texture has.

 

Hmm, this is profiler functionality I wasn't aware of. Usually just have the memory window which shows how many textures there are and memory. Mind taking a few moments to just run through what you did?

 

Did you take a detailed memory snapshot?

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ProfilerMemory.html

 

That's it, thank you for your time. As always, so simple when you know how.