Digital Dragons
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2024–2025
43:13 · 29K views · Oct 10, 2024
A Remedy engineer explains how Alan Wake 2 moved to a GPU-driven rendering pipeline built on mesh shaders, culling and rendering meshlets for dense vegetation on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
HN points to it as a detailed production example of mesh shaders and GPU-driven rendering, though some find it daunting.
4 comments from Hacker News
This is a great read, thank you for sharing! I learned a lot from reading it and I'm pretty experienced in this space! I enjoyed checking out your other work too. OPs article heavily covers Vertex Amplification. I didn't realize VisionOS used Vertex Amplification for this, but it makes sense since the hardware supports it. For those interested in Mesh Shading (a few good videos released this week [1][2][3]), Vertex Amplification is a key tech for Mesh Shading, where one writes Object/Mesh functions (names in Metal API, called Task/Mesh/Amplification shaders in other APIs). Introduced by Nvidia in 2018 and only really available en masse for the last couple years, Vertex Amplification was the first time a GPU could create vertices (or "destroy" them by not emitting anything), versus the fixed mesh inputs. It's so cool and powerful and a different way of thinking about the pipeline. This article shows the same concept, but in Vertex Shaders for multiple render targets. While you might not make a Vision app, it could be worthwhile read to further understand this architecture. I've spent a few months in Metal Mesh Shading and hadn't realized this application of it at all. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video (good explanation and demo)
A related talk of using Mesh shaders for Alan Wake 2 this video And I find Apple’s intro to mesh shading to be a fairly good primer for someone unfamiliar with Mesh shading [LINK]
For example OTOY uses CUDA renderering. [LINK] If you prefer actual code, [LINK] and "Mesh Shaders - The Future of Rendering" [LINK] "GPU driven Rendering with Mesh Shaders in Alan Wake 2" this video
Definitely reverse engineering and shaders. Watching these kinds of talks I realize, I'm not built for this: this video