Hello!

Ive made a shader that has a cubic reflection based on the Alpha of a texture thats stored in the model. If the alpha has white, the model is more reflective there, and if its black, the model isnt reflective there.

So once I was able to sample the Alpha value of a model's second entity texture, i naturally started calling for the RGB values for other shader effects. For example, the specularity strength would use the Red value of the image, another effect uses the Green value of the image.

So if my model has 1 diffuse + 3 textures, and the shader is looking up the RGBA values of each of these 3 textures to determine the strengths of each shading component, is that giving the GPU more work to do? I obviously cannot have every model have cubic mapping + normal + specular + rim + etc. But once you call a texture as a sampler, and Float4, all the information is there already right? Does going into the RGBA values each give more work to the GPU?