Vertex colors vs Materials – do they affect render call or geometry buffers?

Hi c4cc,

Using vertex colors instead of textures can save you video memory, make the app load faster, and improve performance somewhat. Check out this optimization advice for further details.

There is always a “material” applied to the model surface. The question is that with vertex colors you can have this material as simple as possible and without textures.

Baking textures (such as light map/shadow map) can help raise the visual quality of your scene and avoid using GPU-expensive operations like real-time shadows or AO. So it is not about saving the video memory but more about the performance and quality.

The downside is that the application will need to load a baked texture meaning longer loading time. Also baking cannot be employed if you use animation / dynamic shadows.