Nanite requires DirectX 12 Ultimate therefore only specific graphics cards ?

Development Rendering
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1

I have enabled Nanite on a few meshes, and it resulted with the meshes looking very blocky, both in the mesh editor and in-game, as if they were stuck on LOD4

Following some reading, this would be expected if Nanite was not actually working in my Unreal editor, and the meshes are showing in their fallback state.

It seems that Nanite depends on DirectX 12 shader model version 6.6 which can be checked following this guide:

I have installed the latest drivers, and also installed the latest Windows update today, but my shader model version is stuck on 6.5

I think that shader model 6.6 is part of DirectX 12 Ultimate that includes a feature called Mesh Shading that ‘intelligently controls level of detail selection and tessellation for objects’:

And the only cards that support DirectX 12 Ultimate apparently are ‘Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30 Series and GeForce RTX 20 series GPUs … AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 Series and RX 6900 XT’:

My card is not in that list, so I guess Nanite will not work for me ?

2

Nanite works on my Nvidia GTX 1080ti so it works on earlier cards too.

3

I seem to have it working now, with my older card, after re-installing Windows and with the latest graphics driver and the latest Unreal editor upgrade.

I’m not sure if Nanite is fully working, as the triangles visualisation in the viewport shows a basic transition from full-geometry to about half the geometry, when at a distance.

I will try using the new tessellation feature of 5.2 and see if that works as expected, and then post my findings here…

4

Yes the Nanite displacement maps are working. The trick with those is to use 0.05 as the trim relative error.

The latest Windows update 22H2 and the latest Unreal engine 5.2 are what I needed to get Nanite working.

With large meshes, Nanite doesn’t seem to reduce the mesh very much, and performance seems to be less than just using the mesh without Nanite.

Smaller meshes work reasonably well, so it saves a lot of time setting up the LODs

Maybe you need the DirectX 12 Ultimate with its Mesh Shading, to see performance gains at the hardware level.

5

We had tons of people with early AMD cards who didn’t have working Nanite.

This seems to have been resolved recently with a new update.

I believe we have nanite confirmed working as far back as 900 series Nvidia. AMD seems very hit and miss. Most of our users that are experiencing crashes (not necessarily related to Nanite) are using AMD cards.

We currently aren’t using Nanite displacement so I can’t comment on that.

6

Have you checked to make sure your Nividia drivers are up to date? I was having similar issues until I realised I had all my game drivers up to date but my development drivers through Nividia were about 6 months out of date.

Noticeable difference in nanite behaviour