Thursday, February 3rd 2022
Intel Adds Experimental Mesh Shader Support in DG2 GPU Vulkan Linux Drivers
Mesh shader is a relatively new concept of a programmable geometric shading pipeline, which promises to simplify the whole graphics rendering pipeline organization. NVIDIA introduced this concept with Turing back in 2018, and AMD joined with RDNA2. Today, thanks to the finds of Phoronix, we have gathered information that Intel's DG2 GPU will carry support for mesh shaders and bring it under Vulkan API. For starters, the difference between mesh/task and traditional graphics rendering pipeline is that the mesh edition is much simpler and offers higher scalability, bandwidth reduction, and greater flexibility in the design of mesh topology and graphics work. In Vulkan, the current mesh shader state is NVIDIA's contribution called the VK_NV_mesh_shader extension. The below docs explain it in greater detail:
Today's discovery shows that Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist family of graphics cards based on DG2 GPU will not lag behind NVIDIA and AMD in terms of supported technical ecosystem. To learn more about mesh shader technology and some implementations, you can check out NVIDIA's developer blog here.
Source:
Phoronix
Vulkan API documentationThis extension provides a new mechanism allowing applications to generate collections of geometric primitives via programmable mesh shading. It is an alternative to the existing programmable primitive shading pipeline, which relied on generating input primitives by a fixed function assembler as well as fixed function vertex fetch.
There are new programmable shader types—the task and mesh shader—to generate these collections to be processed by fixed-function primitive assembly and rasterization logic. When task and mesh shaders are dispatched, they replace the core pre-rasterization stages, including vertex array attribute fetching, vertex shader processing, tessellation, and geometry shader processing.
14 Comments on Intel Adds Experimental Mesh Shader Support in DG2 GPU Vulkan Linux Drivers
Keep in mind DX12 also supports mesh shaders, probably Intel wants to release support for both APIs at the same time.
That said, that official definition tells me nothing about how a mesh shader is a better idea than the shaders that came before it.
It doesn't really matter anyway, API support is just the first step, we still need software that takes advantage of that.
:)
:)
Talk about dragging it out FFS.
I'm getting the steam deck for the price I can sell my Vega64 for , This truly is a crazy time to be alive , I could drag up some mockery of me, over it,, verses a 1080Ti but none of it's aged well in these comedy times.