So as many of you know, the graphics team is deep into a massive overhaul of the graphics engine (Gen12 project) to both greatly improve overall performance and switch to Vulkan. Star Citizen is a CPU heavy game, and Vulkan will (among other things) significantly reduce the CPU cost of distributing work to the GPU aka draw calls. While Vulkan combined with generic Gen12 improvements will bring wonderful gains, there's another tech on the horizon that I'd love to hear from engineering if they're considering in addition to what's been mentioned for Gen12. Mesh/Primitive Shading seems to allow for both SIGNIFICANTLY higher geometric complexity as well as reduced CPU usage. Here's a traditional pipeline vs a mesh shader pipeline: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/meshlets_pipeline.png Per this blog: Mesh shaders represent a radical simplification of the geometry pipeline. With a mesh shader enabled, all the shader stages and fixed-function features described above are swept away. Instead, we get a clean, straightforward pipeline using a compute-shader-like programming model. Importantly, this new pipeline is both highly flexible—enough to handle the existing geometry tasks in a typical game, plus enable new techniques that are challenging to do on the GPU today—and it looks like it should be quite performance-friendly, with no apparent architectural barriers to efficient GPU execution. http://www.reedbeta.com/blog/mesh-shader-possibilities/ Some Examples: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/meshlets_motivation.png As for why it's easier on the CPU, it seems like you can do far fewer draw calls (per lists of objects instead of per object) and do some neat LOD/Culling stuff directly on the GPU. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7pMw7IdUqz8/W6FqR8lJhaI/AAAAAAAAGcI/w735CUIXhhcToVsC4ic6NpvuomvsygY1QCLcBGAs/s1600/Meshlets2.png This Nvidia dev blog goes more in-depth about the system (but this is not Nvidia specific, AMD just calls them primitive shaders) and from what I can tell this is the future: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/introduction-turing-mesh-shaders/ Microsoft has added support to DX12, and Nvidia already has Vulkan Extensions out: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/coming-to-directx-12-mesh-shaders-and-amplification-shaders-reinventing-the-geometry-pipeline/ TLDR: -Given that: 1) Gen12 is both in-progress and such a massive overhaul to the renderer 2) you guys are going for a modern/highest possible performance design 3) SC is generally aiming to push new boundaries on what's possible in gaming period Has engineering considered moving to a mesh shader/meshlet pipeline in addition to Vulkan? It seems to me that adopting this kind of thing early would put SC years ahead of the competition, giving you a massive geometry and scene complexity budget (wouldn't art love that?!) Additional: "Mesh Shading with Vulkan 3x faster than traditional methods" https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/9ul775/mesh_shading_in_vulkan_3x_faster_than_traditional/ Github sample code: https://github.com/nvpro-samples/gl_vk_meshlet_cadscene "All the triangles!" https://devblogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/pasted-image-0-22.png