primitive shaders and mesh shaders replace the entire front end of our current pipelines.
Both of them would be done in the beginning, at least with respect to the pipeline.
Video here:
Top part of the chart is traditional FF pipeline.
Underneath is the compute queue
Underneath that is Mesh Shaders
And naturally that would be the Primitive shader pipeline as well.
Thinking out loud, one of the differences that I recall is that Mesh Shaders work specifically with Task Shaders, it was something that primitive shaders didn't. That's about all I remember though, I can no longer find the Vega whitepaper.
AMD Describes this as their NGG:
- Next-generation geometry pipeline: Today’s games and professional applications make use of incredibly complex geometry enabled by the extraordinary increase in the resolutions of data acquisition devices. The hundreds of millions of polygons in any given frame have meshes so dense that there are often many polygons being rendered per pixel. Vega’s next-generation geometry pipeline enables the programmer to extract incredible efficiency in processing this complex geometry, while also delivering more than 200% of the throughput-per-clock over previous Radeon architectures.1 It also features improved load-balancing with an intelligent workload distributor to deliver consistent performance.
And I'm not sure if this feature ever saw day of light
Advanced pixel engine: The new Vega pixel engine employs a Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer, designed to improve performance and power efficiency. It allows for “fetch once, shade once” of pixels through the use of a smart on-chip bin cache and early culling of pixels invisible in a final scene. Vega’s pixel engine is now a client of the onboard L2 cache, enabling considerable overhead reduction for graphics workloads which perform frequent read-after-write operations.
