I’ve been trying for the past two days to enable nanite that allows displacement for materials from Quixel Megascans. I’ve tried on a reasonable new MAC M3 and my older PC running AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2920X 12-Core with AMD 5700 XT.
Nothing that I’ve tried seems to be working on either, on the M3 nor my PC. On apple the nanite simply doesn’t work and on Windows the mesh disappears when I enable Nanite tessellation to the material.
I’m on a fairly tight deadline to produce the current project and as this point I’m considering going back to Blender and just push through longer render times for atmospherics, but I would LOVE to render this out in UE5. Has anyone found solutions here; how is it so many tutorials seem to have functional displacement, but it’s so hard for me to achieve?
well… the 5700xt doesn’t have support for mesh shaders, that are required for nanite to run. there is an emulation shader workaround. it very much underperforms even running normal nanite assets, tho. i’m not sure, but i doubt, it can handle tesselation at all.
I discovered this just now and tried it out of curiosity. This may help some people using AMD hardware who want to experiment with Tessellation until Epic / AMD fixes support. Why it works on one and not the other I have no idea but maybe this can help narrow down a fix?
I’m running a laptop ryzen 7 chip which has the 680M integrated graphics. Strangely if I set it to use the 680M iGPU and try using tessellation in UE5.4.3 it actually works, then when I switch over to my 6700s dGPU the tessellation fails and disappears. So If you have integrated 680m AMD graphics you can switch to the iGPU and test these features. It may work with the 780m as well I just haven’t tested.
i dunno specifics, sry. i got a supported gpu. i wouldn’t know how to test anything lower. i know alan wake 2 had the mesh shader emulation enabled and it ran bad on 10 series and 16x0 cards. not sure if you should go this route. probably not.
i’ve seen a couple of cobbled together hacks months ago, but i have no clue how they did that. and for sure don’t know anymore where i found that. sry. for unreal it’s pretty deep in engine programming anyway. i don’t think the average user can do that. it’s not like a plugin that just does that.
In the AMD Adrenaline/Pro control panel, go to the gaming section then graphics section theres an option called “Tessellation mode” change it to “application settings”. This might work.
Good news for AMD users with older cards. Out of curiosity and desperation, I ran another Nanite Tessellation Test with the UE5.5p1 under Win11 with an AMD 5700XT Adrenalin 24.10.1. What can I say, it works Static Mesh and Landscape. It’s like Christmas right now!
Don’t do the displacement inside of Unreal. Handle it before Unreal and import your high poly mesh.
I use blender, so I add a displacement modifier and subdivision surface modifier then tweak the settings until I have the look I want.
Then I apply the modifiers and export the mesh. It’ll be high poly as hell, but so is the resulting mesh inside of Unreal when you use the material to achieve the same affect. Both require nanite to function.
It’s the same thing really, probably doesn’t run as well but seems to work fine for me. Nanite makes high poly meshes work, so it’s pretty much just skipping the step where unreal engine recreates that detail using a map.
Static Mesh and Landscape. It’s like Christmas right now!