Erik Jansson - GPU driven Rendering with Mesh Shaders in Alan Wake 2 on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 1 month, 2024–2025.
talk · advanced · evergreen
A Remedy engineer explains how Alan Wake 2 moved to a GPU-driven rendering pipeline built on mesh shaders, culling and rendering meshlets for dense vegetation on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
HN points to it as a detailed production example of mesh shaders and GPU-driven rendering, though some find it daunting.
“A related talk of using Mesh shaders for Alan Wake 2”
4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
A related talk of using Mesh shaders for Alan Wake 2 ▶ this video And I find Apple’s intro to mesh shading to be a fairly good primer for someone unfamiliar with Mesh shading [link]
in “Mesh Shaders – The Future of Rendering [video]” · View on HN
This is a great read, thank you for sharing! I learned a lot from reading it and I'm pretty experienced in this space! I enjoyed checking out your other work too. OPs article heavily covers Vertex Amplification. I didn't realize VisionOS used Vertex Amplification for this, but it makes sense since the hardware supports it. For those interested in Mesh Shading (a few good videos released this week [1][2][3]), Vertex Amplification is a key tech for Mesh Shading, where one writes Object/Mesh functions (names in Metal API, called Task/Mesh/Amplification shaders in other APIs). Introduced by Nvidia in 2018 and only really available en masse for the last couple years, Vertex Amplification was the first time a GPU could create vertices (or "destroy" them by not emitting anything), versus the fixed mesh inputs. It's so cool and powerful and a different way of thinking about the pipeline. This article shows the same concept, but in Vertex Shaders for multiple render targets. While you might not make a Vision app, it could be worthwhile read to further understand this architecture. I've spent a few months in Metal Mesh Shading and hadn't realized this application of it at all. [1] [link] [2] [link] [3] ▶ this video (good explanation and demo)
in “Drawing Graphics on Apple Vision with the Metal Rendering API” · View on HN
Definitely reverse engineering and shaders. Watching these kinds of talks I realize, I'm not built for this: ▶ this video
in “Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?” · View on HN
For example OTOY uses CUDA renderering. [link] If you prefer actual code, [link] and "Mesh Shaders - The Future of Rendering" [link] "GPU driven Rendering with Mesh Shaders in Alan Wake 2" ▶ this video
in “Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel” · View on HN