AMD researchers reduce graphics card VRAM capacity of 3D-rendered trees from 38GB to

[harlan4096]

What would take 38GB of VRAM to hold now takes just a measly 52KB.
 
Measuring the VRAM impact of trees isn't something most people think about while gaming, but AMD researchers have figured out a way to reduce the VRAM footprint of 3D tree rendering by a whopping 666,352x. AMD researchers recently developed procedural tree generation with work graphs and mesh nodes to optimize tree rendering on video memory.

To demonstrate this, the AMD researchers showcased a 3D-rendered scene that requires only 51 KiB of data to generate. If the scene were rendered with conventional geometry, it would require 34.8 GiB to hold in video memory.

This new VRAM-saving technique leverages a procedural generation technique that eliminates the need for a 3D geometry format altogether. The GPU utilizes work graphs and mesh nodes to produce 3D-rendered trees on the fly in the LOD (Level of Detail) required for the current frame.

With traditional techniques, video memory would be responsible for holding the geometry or polygon format of the trees themselves, which requires gigabytes of memory to store. By procedurally generating trees on the fly on the GPU, the only important data that needs to be held in VRAM is the generation code that tells the GPU how to generate trees in a scene. This code is only kilobytes in size by comparison.

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