Graphic Rants: Nanite Tessellation
A developer provides a technical deep dive into the development of Nanite Tessellation, a feature introduced in Unreal Engine 5.4. The article explains the technical rationale for adding dynamic displacement to Nanite's existing virtualized geometry system.
Why it matters
This technology represents a significant advancement in real-time 3D rendering, allowing for higher geometric detail in video games and film production.
Nanite Tessellation, aka Nanite Dynamic Tessellation, aka Nanite Dynamic Displacement was the next major feature I worked on after Nanite itself. Initial prototypes started back in 2020, only months after showing Nanite publicly for the first time. UE5 still hadn’t even been released to customers yet. After a couple years of shipping Nanite in things and then a couple of years more of development, Nanite Tessellation finally shipped in UE 5.4 in 2024. I started this write up shortly after but it has taken far longer to complete than I ever expected. Needless to say, publishing all this has been a long time coming. It will come in a series of posts starting with this one.
Vertex deduplication / Post transform cache (coming soon)
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