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

AMD researchers have developed a new technique that reduces ray tracing memory usage by 98% when rendering large amounts of detailed vegetation, such as trees and bushes. Traditional methods could require 80 GB of GPU memory and 300 ms per frame to render a scene with 25,000 animated plants made up of hundreds of thousands of triangles.

The innovative approach uses "tetrahedral cages" to simplify the geometry of dense plant matter, allowing rays to be traced along the simplified surface structure instead of the complex mesh of individual leaves. This results in only the cage needing to deform during animation, rather than every vertex of the original mesh. Developers can focus on animating larger areas of foliage rather than individual plants, sacrificing some control over vertex-level animations.

The team is working on making tools available for creating tetrahedral cages and a C++ library to facilitate the process for various types of objects.