Breaking down large meshes into meshlets
In this chapter, we are going to focus primarily on the geometry stage of the pipeline, the one before the shading stage. Adding some complexity to the geometry stage of the pipeline will pay dividends in later stages as we’ll reduce the number of pixels that need to be shaded.
Note
When we refer to the geometry stage of the graphics pipeline, we don’t mean geometry shaders. The geometry stage of the pipeline refers to input assembly (IA), vertex processing, and primitive assembly (PA). Vertex processing can, in turn, run one or more of the following shaders: vertex, geometry, tessellation, task, and mesh shaders.
Content geometry comes in many shapes, sizes, and complexity. A rendering engine must be able to deal with meshes from small, detailed objects to large terrains. Large meshes (think terrain or buildings) are usually broken down by artists so that the rendering engine can pick out the different levels of details...
