An update to NVIDIA’s vk_lod_clusters sample and its new Zorah glTF showcased clustered raytracing combined with a Nanite-like clustered LOD pipeline and prompted improvements to meshoptimizer’s hierarchical clustered LOD support. The scene is huge (≈1.6B triangles, ~70 GB download with textures) but geometry is compressed using meshoptimizer extensions: EXT_meshopt_compression (v0) in the distributed files and the newer KHR_meshopt_compression (v1) standardized in 2026. Decompression stats show raw geometry at 63.3 GB compresses to ~32.6 GB with v0 and ~31.3 GB with v1; indices compress the most, positions and attributes less so. meshoptimizer’s codecs are lossless at their core but support lossy preprocessing and filters for delivery. They prioritize extremely fast, multi-core decompression, reduce disk I/O during processing, and deliberately produce streams that are friendly to an additional post-compression (e.g., Zstandard) to get even smaller deployable sizes while keeping overall decode throughput high.
On the processing and runtime side, the clusterlod.h pipeline remains a split→group→simplify→repeat workflow, now with helper utilities like clodBuildHierarchy to build a BVH over the DAG for fast LOD selection. Attribute-aware simplification (meshopt_simplifyWithAttributes) weights attributes by surface impact, and improvements include attribute-error clamping to avoid overly pessimistic LODs. Partitioning got more spatial coherence via Morton-order sorting (partition_sort), a faster spatial clusterizer (prefetches), and better group partitioning, yielding improved DAG shape and streaming locality. Recent meshoptimizer releases (including 1.3) also stabilized permissive simplification behavior and fixed corner cases such as empty simplified outputs and handling of attribute seams.
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