LucidFlux
Member
So this culling discussion...
I had originally written more but I want to focus on two points. The lossless argument and is Nanite considered culling.
From Epic "Nanite crunches down billions of polygons worth of source geometry losslessly to 20m drawn triangles" - Epic.
So Nanite is able to generate on the fly an infinite level of LODs for every object based on what the viewport requires for that specific frame. If an object is far enough from the camera that small details couldn't be seen, then they aren't drawn. THAT is what Epic means by lossless, The final frame wouldn't look any different if it was drawn with the full quality assets vs what nanite crunched down because the polygons are already as small as a pixel. The source geometry is also unchanged (although why would it be) So I guess it's lossless in that sense. In my world this is just called working non destructively, where you are preserving the original asset or image.
If you want to argue that what Nanite is doing is also considered culling then I do kinda see the point. In a broad sense it's reducing geometric complexity to increase performance. Same goals. However what Nanite is doing is not replacing traditional frustum culling but rather works in concert with it. Nanite first crunches down the scene to determine the necessary polygons for the frame, then the traditional culling methods are applied once the scene is built. Nanite has to do its work first creating all the unique LODs to determine the polygons for that frame before the culling pass.
So in a broad definition Nanite is culling the original assets on the fly. It is not however replacing or even performing traditional culling of back-faced, obstructed or off screen geometry.
I had originally written more but I want to focus on two points. The lossless argument and is Nanite considered culling.
From Epic "Nanite crunches down billions of polygons worth of source geometry losslessly to 20m drawn triangles" - Epic.
So Nanite is able to generate on the fly an infinite level of LODs for every object based on what the viewport requires for that specific frame. If an object is far enough from the camera that small details couldn't be seen, then they aren't drawn. THAT is what Epic means by lossless, The final frame wouldn't look any different if it was drawn with the full quality assets vs what nanite crunched down because the polygons are already as small as a pixel. The source geometry is also unchanged (although why would it be) So I guess it's lossless in that sense. In my world this is just called working non destructively, where you are preserving the original asset or image.
If you want to argue that what Nanite is doing is also considered culling then I do kinda see the point. In a broad sense it's reducing geometric complexity to increase performance. Same goals. However what Nanite is doing is not replacing traditional frustum culling but rather works in concert with it. Nanite first crunches down the scene to determine the necessary polygons for the frame, then the traditional culling methods are applied once the scene is built. Nanite has to do its work first creating all the unique LODs to determine the polygons for that frame before the culling pass.
So in a broad definition Nanite is culling the original assets on the fly. It is not however replacing or even performing traditional culling of back-faced, obstructed or off screen geometry.
