As some of you may already know, tessellation is going to be completely removed from Unreal Engine 5.
Nanite does not replace tessellation in every case, therefore you can’t say that it is made obsolete.
For example:
Displacement maps - Tessellation can be used for displacement maps, a functionality that nanite does not have. Sure, you can bake the displacement map into a mesh in another program and use nanite on that mesh, but that is time consuming and impractical. You could just use the same displacement map on multiple meshes that dont have to consist of one billion triangles.
Procedural Meshes - I think these suffer the most and are mostly overlooked. Nanite does not work with procedural meshes. On the other hand, tessellation does work with procedural meshes, saving time and resources as it is much faster than simply generating a more complex procedural mesh (+ also displacement maps, again). Now there is no way to generate a high detailed procedural mesh efficiently. As a solution, they could let us calculate Nanite for an already generated procedural mesh, and provide a way to use the GPU (parallel computation) for vertex generation, kinda like Tessellation worked).
Increasing detail of a low poly mesh - Nanite does not increase the detail at all, it only lets you use meshes that already have high detail. Tessellation can take a low poly mesh and add detail without having to use other programs.
Point is, I know tessellation has it’s drawbacks, and I get why a lot of people think it’s silly. But love it or hate it, you can’t deny it’s uses especially in procedural mesh generation.
Nanite works great with procedural meshes. This if confusing. I think you need to take a a look at most of the procedural systems built over the past few years. None of them use dynamic tessellation. Take a look at the kind of stuff coming from houdini HDAs. Nanite is actually a huge win for this. I think you might be confusing “procedural” with “runtime procedural” which is kind of confusing but they are different with specific use cases. The idea is you don’t want geometry being evaluated at runtime (which is what shader tessellation is) unless it is absolutely necessary because it is very performance intensive. But in the case of runtime procedural there is a actually a library being worked on in Ue5 Main that looks super cool
That’s not what they said in fact they said they have no solution for common uses of tesallation like displacement and unless you have engineers who can figure it out it’s good luck. To wipe out so much functionality is crazy even if it’s only supported on like Pc or consoles just support what you can. Their excuse is lazy at best and apparently they tried something similar with ue3 to 4 that they eventually had to put back due to backlash.
As arkiras has said before and pointed towards the siggraph talk.
The idea and main goal here is to have nanite for everything!
Which includes tesselation, displacement, landscapes etc.
Dont forget that ue5 is still being developed.
Once the features are ready to be tested at scale they will add them to the early access releases.
Watch the siggraph talk around 1.09 they include some of the future for nanite.
