Blender for Game Development - Unity3D I've been getting into Unity game dev recently. Previously, I've also done some modeling from within Blender. Of course, there's a big difference between the rendering methods on the two different platforms. Cycles can take hours to render, but Unity is real time. Furthermore, I'm planning on developing for the Oculus Rift, so models will have to be mega-uber optimized. And that means I need to know what affects the speed of a render the most.

Verts, Faces, Tris

I've typically paid minimal attention to the Verts, Faces, and Tris in Blender, but now that's different. I need to know which affects the rendering speed the most. I suspect I'll want to focus on making the tris lower, but I don't really know.

Texture Sizes

On top of that, there's textures. Are textures more or less influential in the speed of the render than the afformentioned Verts/Faces/Tris? How can I optimize my textures? Would a lower bit depth do anything or even be worth it? How much does blurring a texture affect the speed?

Blender's Part in this Problem

Evidently, this issue isn't caused by Blender at all. It should be the user's responsibility to optimize their model. The reason I ask this, though, is because I wonder if there are some tools provided by Blender to automatically make a model more efficient. Is there any way to "lower the resolution" of a model to keep the model's shape generally the same while having a lower amount of faces?

As you can see, there is quite a bit about optimization that I don't really understand. There's a good chance that the model complexity and texture size aren't the only factors in optimization. If I am missing something, please bring it to my attention.
I'm not an expert and have never used Unity but from my experience the golden rule of optimization is to reduce the amount of draw calls in the CPU. Each mesh in the scene induces a draw call. You should therefore avoid large number of meshes by merging geometries, doing instancing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometry_instancing) = fancy technique of cloning things and in general learning how to calculate stuff with the GPU (shaders). Other things are reusing materials whenever possible and making sure anything not visible on the player's screen is being drawn. All of these are not related to blender though... the only thing you can do in blender is to go low-poly. AFAIK when it comes to textures they are more of a burden on memory than fps.