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I think the big reason they get such good framerates is their conservatism with shader counts. A staff member mentions that in an interview with DigitalFoundry for Doom: The Dark Ages. I wonder if their in-house technology made such restraint easier.

Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.

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For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy.

The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

> The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

...which is a good thing tbh. No game needs hundreds or thousands of custom materials.

I think it can actually be a bit better in terms of artistic consistency to have a fixed set of materials you can work with in a given game. Very important if you want any sort of stylized rendering!

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