AMD presented method to reduce memory usage for ray tracing

The company AMD presented the technology of Tetrahedral cages ("tetrahedral frames"), which allows to significantly reduce the consumption of video memory when tracing rays in complex scenes.

In a research work, AMD specialists demonstrated a new method using the example of a scene with approximately 25 thousand animated plants. With a traditional approach, processing such objects would require up to 80 Gb of video memory for acceleration structures (BVH), and their update would take more than 300 ms per frame. With the use of tetrahedral frames, memory consumption decreased to 1.7 Gb (approximately 47-50 times), and the update time was reduced to 3.3 ms.

The essence of the technology is that detailed geometry is placed in a simplified deformable frame. The 3D models themselves remain static, and only the outer shell is animated. During tests on the Radeon RX 9070 XT video card, a scene with tracing of about 500 million triangles worked at a frequency of more than 60 frames per second at a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels.

The company's study received the Wolfgang Straßer Best Paper Award at the High-Performance Graphics 2026 conference. The development is still at the research stage and has not been implemented in finished commercial games. Specialists noted that the technology is optimal for foliage, grass, or background characters, but is not suitable for detailed facial animation due to the inability to control individual vertices.