Can somebody ELI5 mesh shaders? I tried to read the documentation from Microsoft but it's too high level for me.

£190 for the Kingdom Hearts Collection, Square continue to be the shittest publisher in PC gaming.

You know what makes this deal so much worse?, this:

KINGDOM HEARTS All-In-One Package is $24.99 on US PSN (includes 1.5 + 2.5 + 2.8 + 3) https://t.co/syvnaYVouN

KH3: ReMind DLC $20.09 https://t.co/IQJs3UHnhk

KH3 $18 https://t.co/Y77yN6ogXn
1.5 +2.5 ReMIX $12.5 https://t.co/Bqs3d1BSOU
2.8 Final Chapter $15 https://t.co/JwYYqXpO8i pic.twitter.com/XiPtHICgw4

— Wario64 (@Wario64) February 10, 2021

So it'll cost a fuck ton to own them all on PC, on a lousy shitty client, while at the same time, not having any PC specific features (highly likely, because SE hardly gives much of a fuck for actually making PC ports fucking out of this world).

Fuck off SE, you greedy cunts. 

What's even worse is that the KH collection is on Gamepass on Xbox right now... You just know that if it wasn't EGS exclusive, MS would have probably included with the PC gamepass as well.

They probably could have, but methinks that Epic has caught onto MS trying to pull a fast one by using Gamepass as a means to subvert total exclusivity, and that's why we're seeing some of these new exclusives not being allowed (just yet).

I mean, Epic making it so exclusive cannot go onto even Gamepass just means that Epic are going to see MS as another enemy (like they already haven't considered that).

I just think this is an incredibly bad move, because by charging $60 a pop for barebones ports (let's be brutal here, when the fuck has SE rolled out the royal red carpet for a stellar, bug free, really good performing PC port?), it's going to come upwards of 190 just to own these games, and even then, they are the fucking confusing versions of the series as well.

People on Twitter are already asking "do I need to play this or that one first?".

The other issue is that it's a franchise that hasn't been on PC before, so I'm not expecting it to sell truckloads (But I just know Epic or SE are deliberately gonna make it sound like it sold an assload in some random news article, a few months from now), and even then, if they actually decide to sell it to Steam, SE are likely to sell them for near full price, which still makes the delayed ports expensive.

I just hate how a Japanese publisher has stooped this low, that they cannot get their god damn greedy childish head out of their greedy arse, to see that this isn't a good move, universally.

This also marks as another move of Epic trying to muscle in on taking Japanese titles under it's wing per year, which of course isn't going to bode well in the long run for the platform.

The best ELI5 I could find is:

"In 3D graphics, a mesh is the set of vertices, edges and faces that define the shape of an object. In current graphics pipelines, all the geometry data in a mesh must be processed sequentially before any further steps can be taken. This can be a significant performance bottleneck.

Mesh shaders replace the old model with a new approach to geometry processing that simplifies the graphics pipeline while also giving developers more flexibility and control. Mesh shaders can process small sections of a mesh, called meshlets, in parallel with a much greater degree of flexibility and control."

https://videocardz.com/newz/ul-releases-3dmark-mesh-shaders-feature-test-first-results-of-nvidia-ampere-and-amd-rdna2-gpus

Now I am not a game dev so take what I say with a grain of salt but afaik it's like this.

Traditional Pipeline has different Shaders that do different things but they also need to wait for the prior Shader to complete it's task before starting the next one:

Vertex Shader --> Tessellation --> Geometry Shader --> Raster

Where as with Mesh Shaders, because it's more general purpose, they can do all that in parallel. So you can tell a Mesh Shader to do Tessellation and you can tell another one to do Vertex and another to do Geometry so that it can all be done in Parallel instead of continuously having to go through the same steps and needing to wait for certain ones to be done first before proceeding to the next one.

Yuri's explanation is pretty on the ball.

You are basically rolling all the vertex and geometry shader work into a single entity, it is then executed before the rasterization process, so that we can more efficiently remove parts that doesn't need to be processed, driving efficiency substantially.

I guess I can consider myself lucky with the Kingdom Hearts situation. I never got to play it on PS2 and never got a PS3, limiting my chances even more.

Nowadays, it's one of those franchises that I don't pay attention to.

AMD's new driver fixed the performance issues in that Mesh Shader benchmark. I figured something seemed off. Now the performance is more in line with the 3000 series: