I’ve been using DOTS for the past few months and I’ve been thinking about the pros and cons.
Sometimes there are comparisons with Unreal’s Nanite, but in fact, Nanite is just an American approach to meshlet rendering.
So, it doesn’t look like if you can replace meshlet with DOTS and if you can replace DOTS with meshlet.
If you are making a city in an open world, I think DOTS will be much more useful than meshlets.
However, if you want to create a wide wild field, I think the meshlet is much more useful.
Even when creating a city, there are areas where instancing is advantageous and GPU-driven is advantageous.
Currently we can’t do it using a mesh shader.
However, with a combination of BRG Culling and Compute shader it will be possible to create GPU-driven meshlets.
The problem is that generating meshlet metadata from a mesh is not trivial.
If Unity solves this part, wouldn’t it be surprisingly simple to use it according to their needs?
I think Unity should have started working on GPU driven pipeline a long time ago. I’d be surprised if there’s no internal prototype. I consider that “the future” (for PCs and consoles).
Maybe it has lower priority because Unity supports much wider range of platforms and many of those are not suited for that, IDK. Also DX12 implementation wasn’t in very good shape until recently.
Would be nice to get some official response from Unity to tell us what we can expect.
I think meshlets were on Unity’s roadmap as feature under consideration but it seems it is not right now:
EDIT:
actually ^^^ this is not true: look at the shader system tab: mesh shaders are under consideration, ofc this doesnt mean they are working on this feature or it will be included into Unity but ppl can vote for it on the other hand
Yeah, lets hope for a advanced runtime sub-mesh LOD streaming system from Unity while it even cant handle basic LOD.
Let me list you if you guys missed:
There is no Automatic LOD generation system in this engine,
also no HLOD,
Texture streaming is in preview,
There is no Lightmap streaming,
APV in preview,
No shader scaling system,
No official imposters system,
GPU Lightmapper out of preview recently,
Realtime lightnings mediocre
There is no normal recalculation runtime to use blend shapes
Graphics Engineers try to split graphic pipeline so hard for 4 years, now they trying to merge back some functionality with full focus.
Not the mention Animation, Input System, Iteration time, pre-historic backend, Terrain, and UI mess…
Unity should be capable before trying to be a game changer