> I don’t think the SSD but rather the GPU would be doing the tesselation...
Ha, I phrased that badly. I meant that, if the high-poly models can't all be stored in VRAM at once, is the SSD fast enough to load them back onto the GPU every frame?
If the tesselation is performed on the GPU (surfaces uploaded to GPU in some non-triangle representation e.g image geometry/SDFs/patches) then I don’t think it’s ever viable to have the tesselated triangles loaded back from GPU memory even to RAM (never mind disk). This isn’t a lot of data. 2 triangles/1 vertex per pixel is just 8K triangles and 4K vertices every frame, that can be overwritten each frame. This is tiny. It’s <1MB!
Ah, that makes sense. I was thinking the problem lay in loading the original meshes, but I didn't consider they could be using a smaller non-triangle format. I really hope they share more about how this works.
Ha, I phrased that badly. I meant that, if the high-poly models can't all be stored in VRAM at once, is the SSD fast enough to load them back onto the GPU every frame?