I was looking into LODs and other techniques that focus on improving rendering performance in games, and I saw someone mention POP buffers. Most of the documentation on them that I can find is around 12 years old, and I can’t seem to find any mention of them anywhere on these forums.
Despite the scarcity of information, the documentation I did find is really intriguing. From what I understand, POP buffers allow you to procedurally/automatically create levels of detail in the mesh depending on its distance from the camera, which reduces overdraw by splitting/merging triangles and helps improve performance without the need for LOD versions of models.
This looks and sounds very similar to Nanite, but it doesn’t seem to be exactly the same thing? (If it was, then wouldn’t it reference POP buffers somewhere? Did it get completely renamed?) Also, the version of the UE I’m using for my game may not include Nanite (I may use UE4) and I think it would be beneficial to learn how to implement my own POP buffers into the UE.
So, does anyone have any information on POP buffers and how to implement them into the Unreal Engine? Have developers avoided making use of them for the past decade? Or are there examples of games that use them? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I apologise if any of this is common knowledge. I’ve tried my best to look into it, but rendering is a topic that I find quite daunting to learn about, so it’s been difficult for me.
This is the best documentation I could find on POP buffers: