In a past life (2000's) I was doing some dev stuff on Ps3, trying to figure out so decent uses for Cell's mass of compute and working around RSX's limited memor

In a past life (2000's) I was doing some dev stuff on Ps3, trying to figure out so decent uses for Cell's mass of compute and working around RSX's limited memory bandwidth while having the luxury of Blu-ray storage to burn through. One such thing I did get a fair way into was something like Nanite - I called it compressive meshing. It is the typical case of misguided engineering hubris at work. The initial work looked promising but the further into the problem I get the more complicated the entire thing become. Having to construct the entire asset generation pipeline was just way beyond what I could manage in the time frame that would look anything decent and not blow out the memory required. I did manage to get something that vague resembled large scale meshes being rendered in a staggered level of detail but it ran SLOW and looked like rubbish unless you hammered the GPU to get sub-pixel accuracy. It was a fun experiment but it was far too much for the hardware and too big of a task to take on as a single programmer. When Epic showed off Nantine... wow they did what I never could in a fashion way beyond even my best vision! It is one of those technologies that when it came along really was a true solution rather than just hype. Yes there are limits as with anything on that scale but it is one of the technical jewels of the modern graphics world. I have said that if Epic was public traded company I would considered putting in a sizable amount of money just based on Nanite tech alone.