Non-Photorealistic Pipeline Tools Without the Template Voice
You've got your toon shader looking right: clean banding, that hand-painted edge, maybe a crosshatch pass that sits just on the right side of noisy. Then you hit play in 4K and the frame rate drops like a stone. It's not the shading math—it's the cache. Shader cache hotspots in NPR stylization aren't the same as the ones in PBR pipelines. They hide in texture fetches, in the way you blend outline passes, in the sheer number of permutations your materials spawn. This guide is a field manual for finding them, fixing them, and knowing when not to bother. Where NPR Hits the Cache Wall in Real Production The 4K pixel load: why NPR shaders feel distinct Most groups treat shader caching as a one-size-fits-all problem. That assumption dies the moment you render a toon character at 3840×2160 with a fat outline pass stacked on top.