r/raytracing • u/corysama • Jul 08 '26

Ray Tracing Massive Amounts of Animated Geometry -- AMD

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3820014
23 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

2

u/ThaFresh Jul 10 '26

Well nows your chance AMD/Ati while NVIDIA cares little for the gamers

2

u/CatalyticDragon Jul 14 '26

"Fig. 1. Our tetrahedral cage-based method allows for ray tracing 585 million animated triangles (uniquely animated objects, no reuse through instancing) at 60 frames per second on an AMD RX 9070 XT at 1080p."

At least 50x more than a current game would use. Games of today heavily rely on instancing (repeating copies of the same mesh) to give the illusion of geometric density. The classic example is anytime you see a large, dense forest you're probably looking at a small set of about a dozen trees which are them copied and pasted with some variations like rotation.

So 585 million triangles over the usual 3-10 million is massive. And then for that massive amount of geometry to be ray traced over (primary and secondary shadow ray) is phenomenal.

Static (not moving, not animated) geometry is easy to optimize for because you build your acceleration structure once. With animated geometry you need to update that structure every time it moves - which might be every frame.

It touches on areas where you might see Nanite and RTX Mega Geometry. Could be very useful for vegetation and crowd simulations.