Research & Innovation
AMD Cut the Memory Cost of Ray-Traced Foliage by 47x. Then an AI Wrote a Path Tracer in an Hour.
AMD Fellow Holger Gruen published a technique that wraps animated foliage in lightweight tetrahedral cages, cutting BVH memory for 500 million moving triangles from up to 80GB down to about 1.7GB on a single consumer GPU. The same roundup reports NVIDIA folding neural shading and geometry stages into the RTX pipeline, and a developer having Claude Opus 5.5 write a working dual-GPU path tracer in roughly an hour.