title: Unity Memory Management: Sprites In Loaded Scriptable Objects --- How Does Memory Use Scale?
body: <p>I have been using scriptable objects as the model (data) layer for my game. I store things like unit stats there. I also started putting the sprites for the unit in this as well.</p>
  
  <p>My question is: If I load a scriptable object which has a reference to a sprite, is the sprite automatically loaded as well? If I load 1000 scriptable objects with sprite references but I am not using those sprites (e.g. no GameObject is using that sprite to render), is there still a memory penalty for these sprite references? Or does the memory use only occur once a GameObject starts using the sprite to actually render? If so, if I have multiple scriptable objects with references to the same sprite, does this increase the memory as well?</p>
  
  <p>I tried doing some memory inspection using the inspector but I was getting sporadic results and the memory footprint was changing too much between runs so I couldn't figure out what was going on (without changing anything I would get 2.2gb in use, then 3.1gb, then 2.6gb). </p>