Despite the best efforts of engineers, naturalistic vegetation in games still requires a lot of memory and computing resources. AMD seems to be proposing radical changes.
AMD has found a way to reduce the amount of video memory used to render trees by an incredible 666,352 times. Researchers have developed an improved tree generation procedure to optimize video memory usage. The video demonstrates the rendering of a scene that requires only 52 KB of data to create. If it had been created using conventional geometry, it would have required 34.8 GB to store in video memory. In the video, you can see, among other things, an amazing change of season, which is not available in modern games.
Unveiled at High-Performance Graphics 2025 in Copenhagen, the new technology uses DirectX 12 working graphs and mesh nodes to build detailed tree models «on the fly», with almost no CPU usage. Artists and developers can customize more than 150 parameters, from seasonal changes in leaf color and branch pruning styles to complex animations and automatic adjustment of detail levels, all in real time.
When testing on a video card Radeon RX 7900 XTX The system generated and loaded the unique tree geometry into the buffer in just over three milliseconds. It then automatically adjusts the levels of detail to maintain the desired frame rate, without fail delivering a consistent 120 FPS under high loads. Wind effects and environmental interactions are handled seamlessly, and the only CPU task is to populate a small set of constants (camera sensors, timestamps, etc.) before fixing a single work graph. There is no need for constant data exchange.
Widespread adoption of the technology will take some time, current support is limited AMD RDNA 3+ video cards and NVIDIA RTX 30 and later. Integration with game engines and console support is still in the works. The engineers are also investigating how to adapt this technology for ray tracing, still extremely «heavy» for today’s graphics cards.
Sources: Tom`s Hardware, TechPowerUp
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