AMD DGF: The Challenge to NVIDIA in Ray Tracing with Open Source

AMD has provided new details about the Dense Geometry Format (DGF), a technology aimed at managing much higher quantities of geometries in video games and real-time 3D applications that seeks to compete directly with NVIDIA's RTX Mega Geometry. The goal is to support increasingly complex scenes in ray tracing without imposing excessive burdens on memory, latency, and energy consumption.

The technical principle of DGF is based on subdividing traditional meshes into small compressed blocks called meshlets. Each DGF-meshlet includes 64 vertices and 64 triangles, enclosed in a 128-byte block that includes metadata. The collection of these blocks then forms a complete mesh, with a structure designed to promote more efficient streaming and denser geometry management.

AMD believes this system could represent a significant advancement for gaming, content creation, virtual production, and advanced 3D workloads. The growth of technologies like Unreal Engine's Nanite has increased the demand for complex models, but ray tracing applied to very small triangles introduces problems related to decoding, memory latency, stuttering, and performance drops.

According to AMD, current API systems for ray tracing acceleration present several structural limitations. The pre-build memory must be sized for the worst case, with notable inefficiencies. Furthermore, the necessity to maintain the exact order of the triangles increases memory consumption, while the runtime conversion to dedicated hardware formats impacts performance, chip area, and energy consumption.

To address these issues, AMD has collaborated with Samsung and various software developers to develop a more efficient open standard for geometric compression, called DGF SuperCompression. This technology allows for a storage cost reduction of up to 30% and compatibility even on hardware not natively designed for DGF.

GPUs based on previous architectures, including RDNA 4 and earlier generations, will already benefit from supercompression, while RDNA 5 will offer more comprehensive support with even greater advantages. AMD thus positions DGF as an important technical foundation for future architectures dedicated to neural rendering.

The market context highlights a steady growth in geometric complexity in next-gen games. Recent demos such as The Witcher IV clearly show how polygonal detail is becoming central, while NVIDIA has already introduced RTX Mega Geometry in titles like Alan Wake 2. AMD, with DGF, prepares a response focused on geometric density, efficiency, and scalability for next-generation PCs and consoles.

There is still no official timeline for the debut of RDNA 5 architectures, but AMD continues to anticipate advanced features such as FSR Diamond and the projects developed with Sony within Project Amethyst, outlining a precise strategy to tackle the next generation of graphics.