You kinda can't blame the IHVs really, Microsoft outlined a specific path for the geometry problem in DX12 and DX12U, which ultimately resulted in the creation of Mesh Shaders, which arguably comes close to the results of Nanite without the crippling Ray Tracing performance of Nanite and the limitations of supporting dynamic meshes. Maybe the IHVs thought Meshlets are the more successful future than Nanite?
I've mentioned this before, but they are not really solving the same problems. Mesh shaders are really inspired by earlier GPU culling stuff like https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws....ons/Wihlidal_Graham_OptimizingTheGraphics.pdf. You may recognize some of the names there... these are not disjoint efforts. Nanite goes further.
How effective is Nvidia’s DMM in practice? Is current hardware ready for an API that allows complex mesh streaming or do we need changes there too?
Didnt hold Remedy back to implement a fully hardware raytracing pipeline.
That evolution seems to have gone something like - "We need ray tracing but GPUs are too slow. Okay, let's speed it up with hardware intersect tests. Yay, fast raytracing. Let's build a BVH for our scene. Oh, that's really slow. Now what..."
Where is the support in UE5 that developers see it as a benefit for their games?
It was pretty well understood from the start. Since it's generally just compute it was prototyped and could run on GPUs before RT hardware even arrived, so the performance was a known quantity. The main things that have shifted over time are the complexity of the scenes that people want to make, particularly now that stuff like Nanite enables much higher complexity than was possible before. Similarly people want tons of dynamic elements now too (windy foliage, crowds, physics deformations, etc) which are very expensive to support with raytracing.
www.intel.com
I haven't tested it personally, but it's more comparable to the new Nanite tessellation stuff than to the regular streaming and LOD things. Brian discussed a fair bit about why we can't just switch everything to tessellated/displaced meshes and we still need LOD below the level of the control mesh (which always ends up being relatively high poly itself, even in these cases) in his Nanite talk:
Both I imagine? There's almost certainly more we can do with current hardware since so much of the BVH construction stuff is in "software" (drivers) anyways. But presumably we'll probably want more flexibility on the traversal side at some point as well which will likely require some hardware changes. I expect all this will continue to evolve over time.
VSM + Software Lumen is already heavy on its own, so it makes sense that console developers are waiting until Hardware Lumen is more performant.
Doesnt work like that. Metro Exodus EE gets 60 FPS on consoles with proper hardware Raytracing. This is different to UE5 which barely uses hardware Raytracing. Epic will just reduce the workload. Should have been done already if this would be so easy. 4A Games only needed two years...
60 FPS presumably means with ray traced reflections + VSM + Nanite. On consoles, Metro Exodus EE has none of these things. (At least, I can't find any references to ray traced shadows).