title: Are tinted sprites actually being batched in newer versions of Unity?
body: <p>Since my day one in Unity development, I've seen tips and stuff saying that we should never tint sprites. If we want sprites of different colors, create them and place them in the same texture, and then swap in the differently-colored sprites.</p>
  
  <p>The reasoning is that tinting sprites will break batching.</p>
  
  <p>I have created a small demo.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Situation 1</strong></p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/arTju.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/arTju.jpg" alt="Situation 1"></a></p>
  
  <p>The same square sprite is used in 6 game objects. No surprise here. In the stats, there is 1 batch. 5 are saved by batching.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Situation 2</strong></p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/yObhs.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/yObhs.jpg" alt="Situation 2"></a></p>
  
  <p>The same square sprite is used in 6 game objects again, but this time, all of them are tinted red with the same color value.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Shouldn't this be breaking batching already?</strong></p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Situation 3</strong></p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bu3b6.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bu3b6.jpg" alt="Situation 3"></a></p>
  
  <p>For the sake of completeness, I tinted the square sprites with different colors. Still, we have 1 batch and 5 saved. Nothing's changed.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Additional information</strong></p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>I captured Situation 1 &amp; 2 during a single play through, and situation 3 in a separate play through.</li>
  <li>I tried tinting the sprites <strong>directly in the editor</strong> by changing the "Color" field of <code>SpriteRenderer</code> and <strong>through scripts</strong> by changing <code>SpriteRenderer.color</code>. The results are the same.</li>
  </ol>