We can force Unity to render distant objects using simpler shaders, which can be an effective way of saving Fill Rate, particularly if we're deploying our game onto multiple platforms or supporting a wide range of hardware capability. The LOD keyword can be used in the shader to set the onscreen size factor that the shader supports. If the current LOD level does not match this value, it will drop to the next fallback shader and so on until it finds the shader that supports the given size factor. We can also change a given shader object's LOD value at runtime using the maximumLOD property.

This feature is similar to the mesh-based LOD covered earlier and uses the same LOD values for determining object form factor, so it should be configured as such.