A Deep Dive into Nanite Virtualized Geometry

Speaker Bios:
Brian Karis is an Engineering Fellow in graphics at Epic Games. Most recently he has led the development of Nanite for UE5. He is most known for work on physically based shading and temporal anti-aliasing although has touched most areas of real-time computer graphics throughout his career. Prior to Epic he worked at Human Head Studios.

Rune Stubbe is a Principal Rendering Programmer at Epic Games, where he focuses on Nanite development and optimization. He has previously worked on rendering technology at IO Interactive and Unity. Rune has also been active in the demoscene (as Mentor/TBC), where he has contributed widely used compression tools and several award-winning releases.

Graham Wihlidal is a Principal Rendering Programmer at Epic Games, primarily working on Nanite and other UE5 initiatives. Previously, Graham worked at Electronic Arts (SEED, Frostbite, BioWare), implementing and supporting technology used in many hit games like Battlefield, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Plants vs. Zombies, FIFA, Star Wars: Battlefront, and others. While at BioWare, Graham shipped numerous titles including the Mass Effect and Dragon Age trilogies, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Graham is also a published author and has presented at several conferences.

[avedarek]

this went from "oh yeah, makes sense" to " I have no idea what he is talking about" really quick

[jjoonathan]

"Oh, yeah, sure, the hardware rasterizer chugs on tiny triangles, so we'll just make a GPU software rasterizer, and make it good, and actually a hybrid rasterizer, and abuse the Z-test wave repacking, and analytically compute all the derivatives, easy peasy!" you guys are absolute mad lads. Amazing work!

[Hababa]

The research and development at epic games is absolutely insane. This is the bleeding edge and it's amazing what they've created

[davidsirmons]

I worked at Epic from late 2003 to early 2005, on UT2K4 as an artist. Sometimes late at night, I'd wander over to the Gears of War side of the hallway and discuss things with artists and programmers like James Golding, Shane Caudle, Cliff Bleszinski, Tim Sweeney, and Chris Perna. Having worked closely with programmers from my very first day in game development years earlier, it was a real joy at Epic to talk with people that both I and the gaming world at large considered masters. Still have dreams I'm working there again. The best achievement of my artistic life is my time there, and will never forget what that felt like.

[krytharn]

The amount of groundbreaking innovation in this work is astonishing.

[parlancex]

I had no idea nanite was using a GPU software rasterizer, that's nuts.

[BlindBison]

The team behind this are true geniuses. This amount of complexity being managed is pretty incredible.

[romainberger]

Brian Karis you can be proud of yourself to what you gave to this industry, many will never realize that the game they're playing can exist only because of you.

[ElfikTheNight]

Wow, just wow! Congrats to everyone involved! And thanks for sharing the gist of how things are done!

[NUCLEARxREDACTED]

This sounds like the technical jargon overload to me half the time, but I feel I could follow along enough to get the raw basics. Very Cool.

[helldunkel]

The amount of dots that are connected here and put to use by Nanite is spectacular. UE mesh reduction has been quite a leap but this really takes it to a new level.

[krz]

Thank you for having the dream.. the dedication and opportunity to work on it. You and your team deserve the best

[tatoforever]

This change in rendering pipeline is more important than any GPU hardware advances in the last 15 years. Amazing!

[thechosenone]

I love this technology but don't tell Activision about it or next COD will have 2TB.

[juanmilanese]

... I member when I could understand (albeit marginally) the tech behind UE4, this is on another level of complexity. Amazing stuff for sure.

[yogiwp_]

Wow the references brought a lot of nostalgia. Was waist deep in this thing late 2000s/early 2010s. Wonder how mega geometry went.

[metacob]

I think this sort of technique is way more exciting than changes in hardware, like raytracing cores. You can actually see the improvement without trying to find a reflection or some shadows that you can compare to a badly-implemented rasterization equivalent.

[tirkentube]

it's insane that they're not only doing this, but explaining how it's done.... i mean shit. they could take the graphics industry, and the film industry by STORM with this.
but instead they show how they've done it, which is pretty amazing, because now other developers from other (especially big) companies will create their own similar methods of doing the same thing instead of paying epic to do it. that's pretty epic.

[Konic_and_Snuckles]

Something I don't understand: the original pipeline used a base geometry of prefabulated Amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic Z-buffer in such a way that the two main spurving vertices were in a direct line with the panametric mesh. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevectors, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar wanecluster that side rasterizing was effectively prevented. The main renderer was of the normal tris-o-deltoid type executed in panendermic semi-boloid threads in the GPU, every seventh LOD being culled by a nonreversible tremmie pointer to the differential girdledraw on the "up" end of the grammesher. As such, shouldn't prefabulated Amulite require less fluorescent score motion than this new Nanite texelencabulator, and therefore decrease sinusoidal depleneration?

[CyberWolf]

This is mindblowing! Couldn't wrap my head around the deep technical parts of it, but I did understand the general ideal and process for Nanite