Erik Jansson - GPU driven Rendering with Mesh Shaders in Alan Wake 2

Digital Dragons · 29K views · 2024 · 43:13

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Computer graphics & renderingGame programming & enginestalk

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN points to it as a detailed production example of mesh shaders and GPU-driven rendering, though some find it daunting.

What it is

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.

Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2024 to 2025.

What Hacker News said

Recommends dagmx · 2024-10 · on “Mesh Shaders – The Future of Rendering [video]”

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]

Recommends neomantra · 2024-10 · on “Drawing Graphics on Apple Vision with the Metal Rendering API”

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

Cites pjmlp · 2024-12 · on “Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel”

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]

Cites flashblaze · 2025-06 · on “Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?”

Definitely reverse engineering and shaders. Watching these kinds of talks I realize, I'm not built for this: [this video]