micka190 , 1 month ago

“Instructions” is probably the wrong word here (I was mostly trying to dumb it down for people who aren’t familiar with graphics rendering terminology).

Here’s a link to the Digital Foundry video I was talking about (didn’t realized they made like 5 videos for Alan Wake 2, took a bit to find it).

The big thing, in Alan Wake 2’s case, is that it uses Mesh Shaders. The video I linked above goes into it at around the 3:38 mark.

AMD has a pretty detailed article on how they work here.

This /r/GameDev post here has some devs explaining why it’s useful in a more accessible manner.

The idea is that it allows offloading more work to the GPU in ways that are much better performance-wise. It just requires that the hardware actually support it, which is why you basically need an RTX card for Alan Wake 2 (or whichever AMD GPU supports Mesh Shaders, I’m not as familiar with their cards).