Touch grass? Not when AMD has whittled down ray tracing memory usage by 98% for these hardware-sapping bushes and trees

As someone who spent a lot of their childhood talking to trees, I'm of the opinion that videogame forestry doesn't need to look any better than Alan Wake 2's Pacific Northwest woodlands. That hasn't stopped AMD from innovating though; by leveraging 'tetrahedral cages' to help render a vast scene of greenery, researchers at the company say they've managed to cut the potential ray tracing memory usage by 98%.

Typically, a scene of around 25,000 independently animated plants made of hundreds of thousands of triangles could hoover up 80 GB of GPU memory. Not only that, but it would take a Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU 300 ms per frame to check which surfaces within a scene are intersecting with a ray (the data structure that organises this information is called a Bounding Volume Hierarchy). In short, using traditional tech to render such a densely populated scene would be slow and choppy.

Holger Gruen, a Fellow of AMD's Advanced Graphics Program, Read Entire Article