
AMD has showcased the transformative potential of the Dense Geometry Format (DGF) in optimizing GPU performance for contemporary animations and ray tracing tasks. The company is exploring the integration of hardware-level functionality for DGF in its forthcoming graphics processing units (GPUs).
Potential Advancements in AMD’s Next-Gen UDNA GPUs: Enhanced Ray Tracing and Animation Performance with Hardware-Level DGF Support
In a recent blog post on GPUOpen, AMD detailed the animation capabilities enabled by DGF. To clarify, DGF is poised to allow upcoming RDNA GPUs to operate with reduced memory bandwidth while facilitating the direct creation of ray tracing (RT) acceleration structures from DGF blocks, thereby enhancing RT performance efficiency.
Understanding the Dense Geometry Format
DGF serves as a game-changing compressed format specifically designed to optimize geometry processing within GPUs. Traditional GPUs handle complex animation geometry, but DGF introduces a method for organizing large triangle meshes into manageable blocks, known as meshlets. Each block is then stored in a dense format specifically tailored for GPU operations. Once the primary DGF block is established, animation can occur more efficiently; rather than unpacking the entire block, AMD’s technique leverages a per-frame compute shader along with re-quantization to manipulate the compressed block effectively.

Benefits of DGF for Ray Tracing
When it comes to ray tracing, DGF significantly minimizes the overhead typically associated with the reconstruction of Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVHs).This advantage arises because the GPU comprehends the DGF structure, which streamlines the resource requirements within ray tracing pipelines, ultimately boosting overall performance. Currently, DGF operations are performed on AMD’s compute shader units; however, future iterations of UDNA GPUs may transfer this functionality to dedicated fixed-function hardware units, potentially accelerating animation processes.
Additionally, DGF’s compression format demands considerably less resource overhead. This efficiency enables a greater amount of geometry to reside within the GPU cache, resulting in reduced latency and enhanced performance metrics.
Looking Ahead
While DGF is merely one of several factors contributing to the anticipated performance enhancements in AMD’s next-gen UDNA GPUs, its impact on ray tracing and animation capabilities should not be underestimated. Even modest improvements like these can lead to significantly faster animation speeds without heavily taxing resources.
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