Take a deep dive into Nanite GPU-driven materials

Dana Cowley

April 25, 2024
Last month at the annual Game Developers Conference, Epic Games Engineering Fellow Graham Wihlidal presented “Nanite GPU-Driven Materials,” an advanced technical talk that takes a deep dive into Nanite's novel GPU-driven material pipeline and you can download the slides here.

This presentation details the GPU-driven material pipeline’s core components and explains how they fit into Nanite’s overall design while also addressing low-level technical details, including how artist-authored materials drive the rasterizer and how final shading is evaluated. 

The talk also covers an innovative variable rate shading technique, challenges of GPU-driven rendering, and learnings and optimizations that were discovered during the development of these new Nanite components.
Although several advanced technical talks have been given on Nanite to date, the GPU-driven material pipeline has only been briefly mentioned. This talk will help you acquire a deep, low-level understanding of how Nanite evaluates its fully GPU-driven materials for both programmable rasterization and final shading.

The recorded version of this talk is available on the GDC Vault (subscription required).

Want to see more?

To check out a few of our other talks on Nanite,
visit the Unreal Engine YouTube channel.

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