Oh, nice. Third party implementations of Nanite playback.
Nanite is a very clever representation of graphics meshes. They're directed acyclic graphs rather than trees. Repetition is a link, not a copy. It's recursive; meshes can share submeshes, which in turn can share submeshes, all the way down. It's also set up for within-mesh level of detail support, so the submeshes drop out when they're small enough.
So you can have repetitive content of very large size with a finite amount of data and fast rendering times. The insight is that there are only so many pixels on screen, so there's an upper bound on rendering work really needed.
There's a really good SIGGRAPH video on this from someone at Epic.
Current GPU designs are a mismatch for Nanite, Some new hardware operations are needed to do more of this in the GPU, where it belongs. Whether that will happen, with NVidia distracted by the AI market, is a good question.
The scene needs a lot of instancing for this to pay off. Unreal Engine demos show such things as a hall of identical statues. If each statue was different, Nanite would help far less. So it works best for projects where a limited number of objects are reused to create large areas of content. That's the case for most AAA titles. Watch a video of Cyberpunk 2077, and look for railings and trash heaps. You'll see the same ones over and over in totally different contexts.
Making a nanite mesh is complicated, with a lot of internal offsets for linking, and so far only Unreal Engine's editor does it. With playback now open source, someone will probably do that.
Those internal offsets in the format present an attack surface which probably can be exploited with carefully crafted bad content, like hostile Microsoft Word .doc files.
Nanite is a very clever representation of graphics meshes. They're directed acyclic graphs rather than trees. Repetition is a link, not a copy. It's recursive; meshes can share submeshes, which in turn can share submeshes, all the way down. It's also set up for within-mesh level of detail support, so the submeshes drop out when they're small enough. So you can have repetitive content of very large size with a finite amount of data and fast rendering times. The insight is that there are only so many pixels on screen, so there's an upper bound on rendering work really needed.
There's a really good SIGGRAPH video on this from someone at Epic.
Current GPU designs are a mismatch for Nanite, Some new hardware operations are needed to do more of this in the GPU, where it belongs. Whether that will happen, with NVidia distracted by the AI market, is a good question.
The scene needs a lot of instancing for this to pay off. Unreal Engine demos show such things as a hall of identical statues. If each statue was different, Nanite would help far less. So it works best for projects where a limited number of objects are reused to create large areas of content. That's the case for most AAA titles. Watch a video of Cyberpunk 2077, and look for railings and trash heaps. You'll see the same ones over and over in totally different contexts.
Making a nanite mesh is complicated, with a lot of internal offsets for linking, and so far only Unreal Engine's editor does it. With playback now open source, someone will probably do that.
Those internal offsets in the format present an attack surface which probably can be exploited with carefully crafted bad content, like hostile Microsoft Word .doc files.