Games have grown exponentially in geometric complexity, with scenes now comprising billions of polygons. Blackwell addresses this with RTX Mega Geometry, enabling developers to use high-resolution meshes like those from Unreal Engine 5's Nanite directly within ray-traced scenes. This eliminates the need for low-resolution proxy meshes, preserving visual detail while optimizing performance through efficient compression and clustering.
I wonder if this has any relation to AMD's Dense Geometry Format, which was specifically designed with Nanite in mind.Nvidia's RT cores now have a cluster decompression function. I wonder if the decompression is flexible to different formats, or if there's a particular format that gets pushed as a standard. Really interested to see how this plays out with Nanite. Is this format designed to be similar enough to Nanite that these clusters can be decompressed by the RT cores? Maybe some conversion needed, or maybe changes to Nanite coming? Will be cool to find out. The new RT cores also do cluster intersection on top of triangle intersection.
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I wonder if this has any relation to AMD's Dense Geometry Format, which was specifically designed with Nanite in mind.
It has no relation to AMD’s format, which is lossy, whereas the HW compression for MG clusters in Blackwell is lossless.I wonder if this has any relation to AMD's Dense Geometry Format, which was specifically designed with Nanite in mind.
Usual caveats - I haven't played with the demo they showed and I can't get into specifics.@Andrew Lauritzen Any chance you are able to speak on how helpful Mega Geometry is to the problems you have discussed WRT tracing against highly detailed geometry?
Usual caveats - I haven't played with the demo they showed and I can't get into specifics.
That said, it's definitely the direction of API changes that are needed to make RT apply to a much broader range of cases. Performance across a range of hardware is still TBD, but I think it's fair to assume this is a strict improvement on the current APIs on all hardware. It's great to see clusters of triangles being treated as the fundamental primitive of rendering, and LOD being done at that level rather than entire instances. It's also great to see acknowledgement that high geometric complexity does matter, and things like alpha cutouts need to phase out. This is exactly the direction Nanite has been pushing. As I've noted in the past, I do expect raytracing to sort of follow in the direction that Nanite has gone because everything that is a problem for Nanite is at least as large a problem for RT (and then RT adds a few more on top).
I'm curious to see more about the tessellation/displacement stuff in the dragon demo they showed. Obviously they've gone a bit of a different direction than their past efforts in that space which I think is definitely a good thing. Nanite of course has added its own tessellation and displacement stuff in the mean time so it will be interesting to see how similar or different things are there. It would of course be great if they are compatible from a content perspective - given that it's probably a prerequisite to any sort of mass use at this point in time I would imagine that was at least a consideration of the design.