[rnd420_69]

That's just one of the many things you can do with them.

Really mesh shaders are just vertex shaders where you see 128 (or whatever the meshlet size is) vertices at once, so things like tesselation or blowing up geometry from 1 to [2,128] just naturally fall out of it.

But even if you just use them for regular triangle processing like you used vertex shaders before, you can do things like cull full triangle groups (a full meshlet) instead of culling per-triangle, which can be a lot faster and more efficient.

You can also use various features that used to be compute-only. Like shared memory.

You could quite easily have groups of triangles share data which was kind of annoying to do before.

Countless more things...

Almost everything mesh shaders can do were already possible with a compute shader that spits out triangles which a regular vertex shader then consumes and passes onto the rest of the pipeline. But with mesh shaders you cut out the writing and reading of that intermediary buffer completely, as your produced data is directly created from the typical vertex data and then handed onto the ROP units.