Graphic Rants: Nanite Tessellation

Nanite Tessellation, a dynamic mesh tessellation and displacement system developed for Unreal Engine 5, officially shipped in UE 5.4 in 2024 after prototyping began in 2020. The feature complements Nanite by allowing artists to author displacement through shader graphs in the material editor, enabling geometry amplification more efficiently than storing full high-poly mesh data. The author argues tessellation is ideal for specific cases where displacement maps and procedural methods provide better data compression than maintaining complete mesh topology.