NVIDIA Mesh Shading

I thought I’d open a thread on this for folks to post details on this as it comes out (and just as an FYI for those that hadn’t seen it yet and are interested). If you see something new on this out there, please do follow up with links!

Just announced publicly a few days ago (this was NDA-only at SIGGRAPH), NVIDIA announced a new variant on the standard GPU graphics pipeline, supported in Turing, which replaces the frontend geometry stages with two new shaders: the Task Shader and Mesh Shader. Reportedly, this offers much more flexibility in how geometry is sourced or generated for rasterization.

No GL-specific info out there on it yet, other than that NVidia says this (unlike RT Core access) will be supported in OpenGL.

Here is some of the content out there on it:

[ul]
[li]NVIDIA Turing Architecture In-Depth (NVidia Developer Blog, 9/14/18) [/li][li]NVIDIA Turing GPU Architecture - Whitepaper (NVidia, 9/14/18) <– See pages 4 and 40-43 [/li][li]NVIDIA Turing-Architektur: Mesh Shading (Presentation video) [/li][/ul]
See the whitepaper for a pipeline diagram. This is a snippet from their write-up:

Introduction to Turing Mesh Shaders blog post with GLSL examples (but no extension spec.)

And now the extension specs are in the registry.

Looks like the latest NVidia drivers have extension support (411.63 Windows): LINK

In the release notes, this is interesting:

Oddly enough, that doesn’t appear to be the case here after installing them.

Other Turing/OpenGL-related links:

[ul]
[li]NVIDIA Turing Vulkan/OpenGL extensions [/li][/ul]

Turing Extensions for Vulkan and OpenGL (NVidia)