AMD has unveiled a graphics breakthrough called the tetrahedral cage technique, enabling real-time ray tracing of 500 million animated triangles. Detailed by AMD Fellow Holger Gruen, the method achieved over 60 FPS at 1080p on a Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU.
The technique encloses dense geometry in deformable cages, keeping the original Bounding Volume Hierarchy static while animating the surrounding structure. This reduces BVH memory usage from 80 GB to 1.7 GB for scenes with 25,000 independently moving plants.
This research earned a Wolfgang Straßer Best Paper Award for its 90-fold reduction in BVH update times. AMD is now developing a header-only C++ library and DirectX Raytracing samples to help developers implement this massive-scale animated geometry tech.