Xbox Series X Mesh Shaders Advanced Culling Cuts Rendering Time

I’m sure you have heard that the Xbox Series X supports all RDNA 2 & Direct X 12 Ultimate features. One of the features that should bring a significant performance boost in games is Mesh Shaders.

We have yet to see games utilizing Mesh Shading and we are not sure what kind of performance increase this will bring in games. However, there are benchmarks that present potential gains already. One of the most exciting demos showcasing how this new technology works is the “Advanced Mesh Shaders” presentation by Martin Fuller. He runs a program on an Xbox Series X dev kit with Mesh Shading enabled in real-time. When he enables Advanced Culling it cuts the rendering time by half.

This may be a simple program focusing on smart geometry rendering. However shorter rendering times will translate to increased performance/better graphics in games. Advanced culling allows rendering time to be saved not only at the geometry rendering stage, but also saves GPU resources later on down the graphics pipeline. As the GPU doesn’t have to apply textures or run shading on objects that have not been rendered. This of course will free up GPU resources which developers can utilize towards better performance or better graphics.