In theory Nanite is superior to precomputed LODs. In practice it's less clear cut as they aren't going to be as good as artist-created LODs and it's not entirely reasonable to expect them to do so. Also the performance cost is huge as Nanite/virtual geometry is a poor fit for modern GPUs. iirc peak fill rate is 1/4th or something like that as GPU rasterization works on 2x2 quads not per-pixel like shaders do.
Rasterizing very small triangles in hardware is indeed inefficient due to the 2x2 quad tax, but one of Nanites tent-pole features is a software rasterizer which sidesteps that problem entirely. IIRC they said that for a screen entirely filled with triangles roughly the size of a pixel, their software raster ends up being about 3x faster than using the dedicated raster hardware.
Yes but I'm talking the other way around. Nanite is 1/4th the performance for triangles that aren't 1-3 pixels in size, which is the majority of the time.
The main selling point of Nanite is really just to reduce artist costs by avoiding manual LODs. But a high quality automatic LOD at build time may (read: almost certainly does) strike a much better balance for both current and near future hardware
> But a high quality automatic LOD at build time may (read: almost certainly does) strike a much better balance for both current and near future hardware
You can't have a manual LOD for a cliff where half is near the player and should be high resolution, and half is further away and can be low resolution. Nanite's hierarchical LODs are a huge improvement for this.
You're also underestimating the amount of time artists have to spend making and tweaking LODs, and how big of an impact skipping that is.
This is assuming you have this "one big cliff mesh". This is the Nanite mindset: Just let the artists throw anything that comes out of their DCC at it. That is a great value proposition for studios, especially the ones that fail the marriage of art and engineering.
It's a bad value proposition for end-users. Nanite is much slower for the same image quality that a bespoke solution would offer, which is evident with several AAA titles that choose to use in-house tech over UE.
Nanite is actually good at AAA graphics for hardware stacks that don't do raytracing well, but if raytracing gets faster, Nanite becomes more useless as it doesn't work well with raytracing. What Nanite is actually good with is providing LODs for only parts of the mesh, so that might get some longer use in the industry.
Nanite batches up triangles above a certain size threshold and sends them to the hardware rasterizer instead, since it is faster to use it in those cases. This was all documented from very early on.
