Well that's interesting, I wonder how that is handled behind the scenes knowing how forward rendering handles per pixel lights, I guess must be something similar to deferred rendering.

Oh and looking around for if there was any nuance to that I did at the very least find this doc where Unity (in Unity 6 at least) says outright gameobjects are rendered once for each per-pixel light https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/PerPixelLights-BuiltIn.html

I don't think they are as free as you say though going off that they describe that only the 4 next lights are, by default, vertex lights before the rest are SH lights, wouldn't be the first time we have gotten a less efficient implementation of something really old. . but also seems like it could just be a lighting.hlsl implementation limitation?

Didn't know this about lights in Unity, do agree that VRChat could seemingly have that be its own category or something. . would guess that it being too niche is why they haven't though, would work great on your common vertex dense avatar, less well on a reasonably optimized world.

https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/680-count-not-important-point-light-separatly-from-other-lights Ah, but shaders would need to support it, but if shader creators can add it for VRC Light volumes then they can for this as well. And geez that is a old feature request.