Programming Efficiently

Some of the recommendations in this topic are incompatible with each other. One must consider the trade-offs between CPU load, memory, bandwidth, shader processing power, precision, and image quality. Premature assumptions about the effectiveness of trade-offs should be avoided. The only definite answers come from benchmarking and looking at rendered images!

The items below are not ordered according to importance or potential performance increase. The identifiers in parentheses exist only for reference.