AMD's new DGF SuperCompression will accelerate Path Tracing performance in games

AMD's new Dense Geometry Format (DGF) for modern PC game development is all about increasing geometric complexity for ray tracing, paving the way for improved performance when presenting detailed, complex, open-world environments. In a sense, it's similar to NVIDIA RTX Mega Geometry technology, with AMD's open solution breaking down an environment and compressing that data into geometry clusters.

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AMD first introduced this new technology in a research paper it published back in July of 2024, and now it's matured to the point where it's available for developers to test and integrate into future games and engines, with support for Vulkan via an updated AMD DGF SDK. AMD has also confirmed that it has partnered with Samsung to bring DGF to "future mobile devices."

In addition to compressing geometric data for ray-tracing, this 30% reduction in storage costs opens the door to more detailed worlds. The compression also supports animated geometry, so it's all-encompassing. As an open-source solution, it's compatible with non-RDNA 4 or Radeon hardware, and the technology is also optimized for the next-generation RDNA 5 graphics that are set to hit PC and console markets.

The way AMD's DGF solution takes dense, uncompressed geometry and significantly compresses it into blocks that developers and engines can interact with for ray tracing and other rendering is a little different from NVIDIA's approach to RTX Mega Geometry. Still, the result is the same: it's all about improving environmental detail while leveraging cutting-edge ray-tracing effects without running into engine or hardware limitations.

DGF also moves this compression work outside of the driver, and with this flexibility, AMD is positioning the technology to become a standard compression format moving forward, much in the same way developers implement texture compression in games.