AMD’s new architecture will improve animations and ray tracing

AMD has revealed details about DGF (Dense Geometry Format), a technology intended to significantly improve the efficiency of future graphics cards built on RDNA 5 and UDNA architectures.

The company says the new geometry format speeds up animation processing and ray tracing, reduces memory pressure, and shortens the time required to build BVH (bounding volume hierarchy) structures.

DGF is a compact geometry format optimized for GPUs. Instead of processing large, complex triangle meshes directly, models are divided into smaller blocks known as meshlets. These blocks are compressed and stored locally so that only the necessary portions need updating rather than the entire mesh. This reduces memory bandwidth demands and helps accelerate frame rendering in games.

A key challenge for ray tracing is the constant need to update BVHs. DGF enables the GPU to interpret the block structure directly, cutting resource overhead and speeding up that workflow.

AMD notes that DGF currently runs on compute units, but in future UDNA-based cards the format could be implemented in dedicated hardware modules, providing further performance gains.

Advertised advantages of DGF:

• lower memory usage — more data can fit in the GPU cache;
• faster animations — updating blocks consumes fewer resources;
• improved ray-tracing throughput — BVHs can be built directly from DGF;
• AI potential — new techniques for scene and shadow reconstruction may become possible.

DGF is currently available through the GPUOpen toolkit. In upcoming RDNA 5 and UDNA GPUs it could be integrated into hardware, helping AMD better compete with NVIDIA’s offerings. Initial information about RDNA 5 is expected in 2026.

Source: iXBT.games