Nvidia has just released a demo to showcase its Mesh Shading technology. The aim is to ensure the quality of the presentation while reducing the number of calculations. The Turing architecture was given a new programmable geometry shading channel. Instead of processing nodes or geometry in any flow in the middle of a pipe with fixed functions, the new pipe works simultaneously with a group of objects, generates small meshes using the GPU, and uses rules set by the application itself. This approach greatly improves geometric programming capabilities and enables the implementation of advanced selection methods, a higher level of detail, or the acceleration of topology generation.
In the Nvidia Asteroids demonstration, the GPU offers a very high frame rate, despite the complexity of the scene to be created. It is observed that shaders effectively remove triangles that will never be visible and only display those that are present in the displayed pixels. That is, the GPU draws only what is visible.
Mesh Shading (Turing) is used to manage the rendering level of objects in a scene according to their distance. In other words, the GPU of the graphics card is used to manage the LOD alias, i.e. the level of detail or number of triangles to be generated.
Asteroid Mesh Shader Demo from Nvidia
For example, it does not make sense to create invisible triangles. The shading fabric relieves the PC processor. This improves performance without normally affecting rendering.
To better understand the process, Nvidia offers a demo showing the advantages of this technology. It reduces a scene from 3500 billion triangles to 50 million triangles without affecting the display. When performance is the most important argument, using it in a video game also allows more complex scenes with thousands of objects to be displayed.
This rendering layer management is real-time and, most importantly, dynamic. This means that a remote asteroid gradually gains render quality as it approaches.