Geometric detail in computer graphics has increased exponentially in the past 30 years. To render high quality assets with higher instance counts and greater triangle density, NVIDIA introduced RTX Mega Geometry. RTX Mega Geometry is available today through NVIDIA RTX Kit, a suite of rendering technologies to ray trace games with AI, render scenes with immense geometry, and create game characters…
]]>This post covers best practices for mesh shaders on NVIDIA GPUs. To get a high and consistent frame rate in your applications, see all Advanced API Performance tips. Mesh shaders are a recent addition to the programmatical pipeline and aim to overcome the bottlenecks of the fixed layout used by the classical geometry pipeline. This post covers best practices for both DirectX and Vulkan…
]]>Mesh shaders were introduced with the Turing architecture and are shipping with Ampere as well. In this post, I offer a detailed look over mesh shader experiences for these hardware architectures so far. The context of these results was primarily CAD and DCC viewport or VR-centric. However, some of it may be applicable to games as well, which increase in geometric complexity.
]]>This post was updated substantially in March 2020. The original post was about the experimental NVX extension, while the current post is about the production NV version. We are releasing the (DGC) Vulkan extension, which allows GPU generation of the most frequent rendering commands. This extension offers an improved design over the experimental NVX extension.
]]>Sometimes the evolution of programming languages creates situations where “simple” tasks take a bit more complexity to express. Syntax annoyance slows down development or can negatively affect readability of code during maintenance. With this in mind, we recently released an open-source sample of a GLSL header generator for DescriptorSet-indexed types in Vulkan. For example, look at ray tracing…
]]>The Turing architecture introduces a new programmable geometric shading pipeline through the use of mesh shaders. The new shaders bring the compute programming model to the graphics pipeline as threads are used cooperatively to generate compact meshes (meshlets) directly on the chip for consumption by the rasterizer. Applications and games dealing with high-geometric complexity benefit from the…
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