Is there any news on an alternative to nanite?
This could be beneficial to both HDRP and URP both, since it could drastically reduce draw calls while LODing realtime.
For huge worlds this is great, but for mobile games it could also help a lot!
I know there is an HLOD repo on GitHub ( GitHub - Unity-Technologies/HLODSystem ), but I thought I read online this isn’t necessarily going to be an official add-on to the engine (and it might make Unity really slow when editing? Not sure if it runs in the scene view as well)
We have started work to significantly reduce the number of drawcall to reduce CPU load and allow higher geometry complexity of scenes.
We plan to deliver this in multiple steps.
A first step is coupled to the tech we call the BatchRenderGroup that will accelerate occlusion with CPU and GPU.
After this we plan a second step to propose a full GPU pipeline on top of it with Visibility Buffer.
The team is actively working on it, however we have no ETA to communicate at the moment.
The technique used by nanite to decouple geometry from the materials (visibility buffer) isn’t really suitable for tile based mobile GPUs and relies heavily on advanced compute shader features like 64-bit interlocked operations which are not commonly supported on mobile.
Plus, any technique which does work to reduce another type of work has a cost that’s only worth it if the amount of work reduction outweighs the added work. Which means the gains might only show up past a certain level of scene complexity that would be too much for a mobile anyway.