Calvin ✨

Wait, is it that bad to use? i use it way to much

they should be used cautiously, but Ue4 handles them quite well. @JKashaar (or any other amazing tech-person) can probably explain it better than I ever could though.

These days they're generally not a problem, just be aware that normally both inputs of the If get executed, so it's kind of more like a hard Lerp and doesn't save you any performance costs.

Somehow this topic always brings out the heavy debates, would branching where the conditional is the same across the entire drawcall be more performant than a lerp? my understanding was that If-s are mainly bad if the conditional evaluates differently within a 2x2 quadrant

Yes you're right. Dynamic branching incurs a performance cost if the conditional diverges across the pixel group (because the GPU processes multiple pixels in parallel). So if you use it essentially as a switch, it'll be fine.

Alright, glad that stuck with me then It seems to be a pretty finicky topic based on previous posts I've seen (Maybe cause the severity differs among engines?), it gets hard to gauge which one's correct sometimes