AMD has shared details about DGF (Dense Geometry Format) technology, which should significantly improve the efficiency of future video cards with RDNA 5 and UDNA architectures.
The company explained that the new geometry format accelerates animation and ray tracing processing, reduces memory load, and shortens the construction time of BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) structures.
DGF is a dense geometry format optimized for GPUs. Instead of processing complex triangular meshes, large models are divided into blocks called meshlets. These blocks are compressed and stored locally, allowing only the necessary data to be updated, rather than the entire mesh. This approach reduces memory bandwidth requirements and speeds up frames in games.
The main problem with ray tracing is the need to constantly update the BVH. DGF allows the GPU to directly understand the structure of the blocks, which reduces resource costs and speeds up the process.
AMD notes that while DGF currently runs on compute units, in future UDNA-based cards, the technology may move to hardware modules, providing increased performance.
The stated advantages of DGF:
- less memory usage — more data fits into the GPU cache;
- accelerated animations — updating blocks requires fewer resources;
- increased ray tracing speed — BVHs are built directly from DGF;
- potential for AI — new methods of scene and shadow reconstruction are possible.
DGF is currently available in the GPUOpen package. In future RDNA 5 and UDNA GPUs, it may become part of the hardware architecture, allowing AMD to compete with NVIDIA solutions. The first details about RDNA 5 are expected in 2026.
