Mesh shader
A modern geometry pipeline that replaces the vertex, tessellation and geometry stages with two compute-like stages that output geometry directly.
Instead of the fixed flow vertex → tessellation → geometry, the work is split into a task stage, which decides how much geometry to produce, and a mesh stage that emits small clumps of triangles — meshlets — directly. The model resembles a compute shader: free thread layout, shared memory and per-meshlet culling instead of a per-vertex stream through fixed-function units.
Introduced by Nvidia with the Turing architecture (2018) and later standardised in DirectX 12 Ultimate and Vulkan (2022). The payoff is less fixed overhead and finer control over culling invisible geometry — decisive when scenes carry more triangles than pixels. Nanite in Unreal Engine 5 is built on the idea.