Microtriangles: The Real Killer of Rendering Performance, Not Poly Count
2025-07-19
The old lore about polygon count determining rendering performance is outdated. Modern rendering is significantly impacted by microtriangles. This article argues that tiny triangles (under 10x10 pixels) become exponentially more expensive to render because GPUs compute a full 2x2 pixel block even if the triangle only covers one pixel. The author suggests focusing on "wireframe view density", switching to lower LODs when the view gets close to solid, or using a single LOD with imposters for distant objects. Epic's Nanite technology tackles this by using compute shaders and screen-space shaders to minimize the cost of rendering microtriangles.
Development
LOD optimization