Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

Mesh shaders are something that certainly interests me greatly, that we would really love to look at. One thing we maybe have to temper that with is that the adoption rate currently isn't huge among the market for this new technology, I think. Rough numbers, maybe 30% or something of our player base. But that's obviously going to grow over time. And we also have to take into account that by the time you actually make the technology, the adoption rate would increase by the time you release it. But still, we have to be careful in what we use it for. If we made these new mesh shaders, which is a new way of building and rendering geometry, our core, only method of rendering geometry, we would lose half our player base, and that would be a huge storm. So we have to be wary that that's not a possibility. Now, you can use them for optimizations, which is one of the main benefits, but then you're giving an optimization to the highest-power GPUs that may not actually need it that much. So it's a difficult question. The ideal use is something that can improve the visuals, so the people with the more powerful, more modern GPUs get to see these new visuals, but somehow it doesn't impact the experience of the slightly less powerful GPUs still playing the game. We [don't] really want to cut people off. And I don't want this to be interpreted as holding back. It's more bang for buck. If we're not doing mesh shaders, we're doing something else. We're giving some of the benefits to as many people as we can. But at some point, the tide will turn, and the benefits will be clearer by using mesh shaders than by focusing elsewhere. So it's definitely something that's very interesting for us. And there's a few areas we've been discussing where we would potentially like to use them. But yeah, Gen12 is the focus. So that's on ice until Gen12 has shipped.