What can technical artists learn from testing 'shader myths'

gamedeveloper.com:

Technical Art is one of the video game industry's most in-demand professions, and for good reason. It's a highly specialized skill that makes the most of complicated math to render beautiful particles and shaders. To make the most of such a complicated craft, tech artists often rely on standard tricks and assumptions in order to maximize their time and effort in an arduous game development cycle.

But should tech artists always be relying on those old assumptions? Like in any profession, the answer is "not without checking them first." Epic Games developer relations technical artist Matt Oztalay recently blasted this message loudly and clearly in a presentation he gave at Game Developer Talks—a new webinar series coordinated by Game Developer and our colleagues at Game Developers Conference.

In his talk—titled "Investigating and Dispelling Shader Myths... with Science!"—Oztalay challenged tech artists to reassess their assumptions about this complicated craft. Should you use a LUT instead of a polynomial? Should you always pack your floats into a vector before you do the math on them?

Maybe! But if you've got the bandwidth, why not double check your math before pushing "commit" on that code? Here's some quick lessons from Oztalay's talk:

In any piece of software, instruction count is the total number of instruction executes contained within a program. Oztalay admitted that it's a "tough" myth to crack because in Epic Games' Unreal Engine...instruction count is displayed in a number of key places.

"Unfortunately, these don't tell the whole story," he said. "HLSL instructions are just one part of a larger pipeline to get what you want showing up on the screen." 

So conventionally, a tech artist builds a serial graph and turns it