I already thought of that, but that's not in the best interest of the map. Do invisible textures still bear any kind of impact on performance?
Yes they do still have a performance impact. Although they might be culled from certain fragment/pixel calculations due to being invisible (no colour, no z depths, possibly no fragment but I am unsure), they will still have vertex and geometry overhead as there is no way to tell that they will be invisible until at least the fragment shader (possibly later as they might not be textured then) and they will not be invisible if certain layers are activated such as wireframe.
As far as I am aware lighting has practically no performance impact in StarCraft II due to the more modern approach adopted by the shader pipeline and how powerful modern GPUs are. A scene with several hundred lights, eg marines firing all at once and even casting shadows with their nuzzle flash, seems to not affect performance in a noticeable way. StarCraft II is almost always CPU limited in most cases of low frame rate.
Particles are a big performance killer, especially at high visual settings. Not only do they often rely on a large number of blend operations to work, they also use a lot of CPU power for particle movement physics and ordering the particles to be rendered. Fortunately users can turn down particle quality setting in game which will reduce the CPU overhead by reducing the update rate and density of particles.
Yes they do still have a performance impact. Although they might be culled from certain fragment/pixel calculations due to being invisible (no colour, no z depths, possibly no fragment but I am unsure), they will still have vertex and geometry overhead as there is no way to tell that they will be invisible until at least the fragment shader (possibly later as they might not be textured then) and they will not be invisible if certain layers are activated such as wireframe.
As far as I am aware lighting has practically no performance impact in StarCraft II due to the more modern approach adopted by the shader pipeline and how powerful modern GPUs are. A scene with several hundred lights, eg marines firing all at once and even casting shadows with their nuzzle flash, seems to not affect performance in a noticeable way. StarCraft II is almost always CPU limited in most cases of low frame rate.
Particles are a big performance killer, especially at high visual settings. Not only do they often rely on a large number of blend operations to work, they also use a lot of CPU power for particle movement physics and ordering the particles to be rendered. Fortunately users can turn down particle quality setting in game which will reduce the CPU overhead by reducing the update rate and density of particles.