“Instructions” is probably the wrong word here (I was mostly trying to dumb it down for people who aren’t familiar with graphics rendering terminology).
Here’s a link to the Digital Foundry video I was talking about (didn’t realized they made like 5 videos for Alan Wake 2, took a bit to find it).
The big thing, in Alan Wake 2’s case, is that it uses Mesh Shaders. The video I linked above goes into it at around the 3:38 mark.
AMD has a pretty detailed article on how they work here.
This /r/GameDev post here has some devs explaining why it’s useful in a more accessible manner.
The idea is that it allows offloading more work to the GPU in ways that are much better performance-wise. It just requires that the hardware actually support it, which is why you basically need an RTX card for Alan Wake 2 (or whichever AMD GPU supports Mesh Shaders, I’m not as familiar with their cards).
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Here’s a link to the Digital Foundry video I was talking about
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Ah, mesh shaders. Cool stuff. AMD retroactively added them to their old GPUs in drivers. I think same goes for Intel’s post-Ivybridge GPUs(I think
send
opcode can throw primitives into 3d pipeline, if you are interested, you can go read docs). I guess Nvidia can do something similar.And even if they don’t have such straightforward way of implementing them, they probably(my guess, can be wrong) can be emulated in geometry shaders.
What I don’t like is apparent removal of vertex fetcher, but maybe there will be extension that will return it.
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Nvidia has patched them into the GTX series, they’re just really slow compared to RTX cards.