NVIDIA Asteroids Demo Showcases Turing Mesh Shaders

cageymaru

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NVIDIA has released a demo of Turing mesh shader technology being used to create smart culling systems to manage the level of detail (LOD) and improve rendering efficiency. Turing brings a new compute programmable model to the graphics pipeline that is based on task and mesh shaders. This is accomplished in the asteroids demo by the GPU hardware checking the asteroids for visibility to determine the LOD(s) to use. The new graphics pipeline uses cooperative thread groups to create compact meshes (meshlets) on the chip using application-defined rules. These meshlets are tested by the mesh shader. The remaining triangles are culled by the GPU hardware. Older GPU technologies would have to cull each triangle individually which created huge workloads for the GPU and CPU. In the video it shows 3.5 trillion triangles being culled to only 50 million triangles actually drawn on screen. The Asteroids demo can be found here.

By combining together efficient GPU culling and LOD techniques, we decrease the number of triangles drawn by several orders of magnitude, retaining only those necessary to maintain a very high level of image fidelity. The real-time drawn triangle counters can be seen in the lower corner of the screen. Mesh shaders make it possible to implement extremely efficient solutions that can be targeted specifically to the content being rendered. Tessellation is not used at all in the demo, and all objects, including the millions of particles, are taking advantage of Mesh Shading.
 
Looks great. Ill stick with my 1080ti until actual games start using it though.
 
The original asteroids beat the graphics easy:
220px-Asteroids-arcadegame.jpg
 
It's a beautiful demo but if I'm not mistaken, this will be driven by vr. Because LOD will make all the difference in that platform.
 
But triangle culling is done by triangle culling units anyway and "this isnt tessellation" well why not? this is the exact use case for tessellation, which is faster.
I'm sure there's use for this but it's not a great one.
 
I can't wait for the 4080Ti when the games will be there to support all this and the GPUs powerful enough to run 4K at 120Hz...
 
You guys realize you can be red all day long and bitch and moan over nvidia, but I sure as hell dont see AMD doing much of anything advancing GPU technology as of today. And dont try to bulldoze I'll believe the rumor mill when it's real.
 
OMG Just what games have needed... more shiny to distract from shitty gameplay :D
Remember the old laserdisc games where you basically clicked a couple of times and then it played a few seconds of pre-rendered video? I still cringe when I think of it. The ultimate example of 'looks before content' way of game design.
 
You guys realize you can be red all day long and bitch and moan over nvidia, but I sure as hell dont see AMD doing much of anything advancing GPU technology as of today. And dont try to bulldoze I'll believe the rumor mill when it's real.
I see this more like DX12. Lots of hype but a bag of hot air in reality, leading just to poor performance.
 
You guys realize you can be red all day long and bitch and moan over nvidia, but I sure as hell dont see AMD doing much of anything advancing GPU technology as of today. And dont try to bulldoze I'll believe the rumor mill when it's real.
"Mesh shader" is more or less the same as what AMD tried to do with "primitive shader" in Vega. However, primitive shader is fubar...
 
I see this more like DX12. Lots of hype but a bag of hot air in reality, leading just to poor performance.
But even taking into consideration what dx12, although poorly implemented, was trying to achieve... if we dont take risk for advancement we'll be stale. When the AMD fan crowd encouraged here comes out in numbers and overwhelmes a post about an interesting if flawed advancement it's annoying. Just my 2 cents.
 
But triangle culling is done by triangle culling units anyway and "this isnt tessellation" well why not? this is the exact use case for tessellation, which is faster.
I'm sure there's use for this but it's not a great one.
Mesh shaders are perhaps the most exciting new feature in RTX series.
It allows GPU to finally have fast and flexible geometry processing which rivals VU1 found in playstations 2.

Opportunities are pretty much everywhere, culling, lods, instancing, geometry generation, particles, lighting optimizations, animations
http://reedbeta.com/blog/mesh-shader-possibilities/

I would love to see Intel and AMD to follow nvidia on this one the faster we get this to all hardware the better. (And paths to Unity & Unreal.)
 
Nvidia has shit out these kinds of demos for years, and we rarely see them reflected in games until many more years later. But I still enjoy watching them and contemplating the future.
 
Mesh shaders are perhaps the most exciting new feature in RTX series.
It allows GPU to finally have fast and flexible geometry processing which rivals VU1 found in playstations 2.

Opportunities are pretty much everywhere, culling, lods, instancing, geometry generation, particles, lighting optimizations, animations
http://reedbeta.com/blog/mesh-shader-possibilities/

I would love to see Intel and AMD to follow nvidia on this one the faster we get this to all hardware the better. (And paths to Unity & Unreal.)

Nice read, thank you
 
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