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Virtual Geometry in Bevy 0.14

Introduction The 0.14 release of the open source Bevy game engine is coming up, and with it, the release of an experimental virtual geometry feature that I've been working on for several months. In this blog post, I'm going to give a technical deep dive into Bevy's new "meshlet" feature, what improvements it brings, techniques I tried that did or did not work out, and what I'm looking to improve on in the future.

I'd also like to take a moment to thank LVSTRI and jglrxavpok for sharing their experiences with virtual geometry, atlv24 for their help in several areas, especially for their work adding some missing features I needed to wgpu/naga, other Bevy developers for testing and reviewing my PRs, Unreal Engine (Brian Karis, Rune Stubbe, Graham Wihlidal) for their excellent and highly detailed SIGGRAPH presentation, and many more people than I can name who provided advice on this project. Combine this LOD technique with some per-cluster culling, a visibility buffer, streaming in and out of individual cluster data to prevent high memory usage, a custom rasterizer, and a whole bunch of others parts, and you end up with a renderer that can deal with a scene made of 500 million triangles. Binary search might seem surprising - it's multiple dependent divergent memory accesses within a thread, and one of the biggest performance metrics for GPU code is cache efficiency.

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