Your comparison was unfair anyway because you added displacement, which introduced more geometric details and changed the shape of the mesh.
It’s not unfair, your missing the point entirely if you think that.
This essentially forced the creation of far more clusters.
That’s why I displaced it. The whole point is to show overdraw induced from dense clusters ends up being the same as overlap/failed culling overdraw
In a real scenario, it’s beneficial for Nanite to increase geometry (without changing the model’s shape so much with hard noise.
I’m kinda confused by what you mean here, since you can’t just “increase” geometry. That makes it sound like flat subdivisions will do the trick when Nanite will detects this action and just collapses them into no clusters or large clusters. Unless you have a way to share how flat subdivisions can be kept for clusters? What my test showed(and I replicated in 5.4) is that increasing clusters via detail(noise, rock/wood patterns, doesn’t matter) will increase cost due to the cluster overdraw they induce.
More information about this: https://youtu.be/dj4kNnj4FAQ?si=0De9MINyRneN6p00&t=2004
That was produced 9 days after the Threat Interactive Nanite video was produced. The presenter said the opposite information last year (which I proved wrong) and he gave more wrong information in the video. There are even comments on the video calling him out for it.
My test recreated your scene by adding subdivision - which improves culling:
There is no change in cost as you can measure the surface area of both heatmap shots.
Yes one has more clusters/better culling, but that’s because 2nd objects have the opportunity to have more angle variance. Three issues
#1 causes more aliasing
#2 smooth objects cannot “benefit”(#3) from this.
#3 It cost more than basic overlap overdraw.
There’s nothing really wrong with your test if I’m going by your word(which I can and will for the time being).
It just needs the context.