HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Erik Jansson - GPU driven Rendering with Mesh Shaders in Alan Wake 2 Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

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

Digital Dragons
Talks
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this talk1 month2024–2025 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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

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.

“A related talk of using Mesh shaders for Alan Wake 2” (HN, 2024)

2 recommendations · 2 citations · Talks · advanced

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@dagmx Oct 2024 Recommends
on HN thread 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]
Related talk on mesh shaders in Alan Wake 2
@neomantra Oct 2024 Recommends
on HN thread Drawing Graphics on Apple Vision with the Metal Rendering API
Read more
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 first time a GPU could create vertices (or "destroy" them by not emitting anything), versus the fixed mesh inputs. It's so cool and powerful and a different way of thinking about the pipeline. This article shows the same concept, but in Vertex Shaders for multiple render targets. While you might not make a Vision app, it could be worthwhile read to further understand this architecture. I've spent a few months in Metal Mesh Shading and hadn't realized this application of it at all. [1] [link] [2] [link] [3] [this video] (good explanation and demo)
Good explanation and demo of mesh shading

Citations, criticism and jokes

@pjmlp Dec 2024 Cites it
on HN thread 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]
Example of GPU-driven rendering with mesh shaders

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close