Speed Tree 8 shader (among others) unnecessarily taking up RAM?

I am running a 2D game. Nowhere am I using Nature/speedtree8, and yet for some reason, the memory profiler is telling me it’s using up about 25mb of RAM. I am aiming to support less than a GB of RAM, so 25mb for no reason is a bit annoying, along with another 25mb being used by other shaders (mostly in Nature/terrain). Is there a reason why this is happening? Is it just in the editor?

I’m having the same issue.

I have the same issue and have seen related questions in different forums, never with an answer. Has anyone figured this out?

This is just in the editor. Unity likes to have all internal shaders loaded into memory to speed things up while you’re working on your game.

In general, a game running in the editor will have subpar performance / memory usage compared to actual builds. Therefore you should always build and run your game on its target platform when hunting for performance issues.

Maybe you are using LOD Groups? This script has a speedtree setting which might reference the shader.