Researchers in the field of graphics have developed a GPU-powered procedural algorithm capable of generating 35.6 GB of trees, leaves, and brushes, all from a mere 52 kB of initial data.
Cracking the Code on Dense Vegetation with 52 kB
If you're a graphics enthusiast, you know that dense vegetation can be a real GPU resource hog, gobbling up precious VRAM or shader time or both. But fear not! A gang of university researchers and AMD techies have cooked up an ingenious solution that generates staggeringly realistic trees, branches, and leaves - virtually 36 GB worth - using just 52 kB of data.
They presented their groundbreaking work at the Eurographics Association's High-Performance Graphics 2025 Symposium. Now, let's be honest, their paper reads like a manual for alien technology, but here's the cliff notes version: the algorithm uses work graphs on the GPU to generate eye-popping vegetation from a puny 52 kB data blob - barely larger than a single L1 cache block of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, the GPU they used for their test runs.
Now, work graphs are the shiny new toy in graphics APIs like Direct3D and Vulkan. Essentially, they allow GPUs to manage their own workload, invoking shaders without waiting for the CPU to chat them up.
While procedural generation isn't exactly new, the demo scene of the late 90s and early 2000s was bursting with jaw-dropping routines that ran on next to nothing, like the sensational .fr08 .the .product demo, which weighed in at 64 kB.
But the Coburg University wizards and their AMD pals have taken things to a whole new level. Not only have they produced a forest's worth of trees, bushes, and leaves from such a microscopic 52 kB data chunk, but the RX 7900 XTX only needs an average of 7.7 milliseconds to cook up and display everything.
That's pretty darn close to being game-ready. If you're aiming for a mean frame rate of 60 fps, you've only got 16.7 milliseconds to handle everything. Spending half of that time rendering nothing more than a short view distance full of trees and bushes might not be ideal, but hey, progress comes with cost, right?
Plus, creating all that greenery from traditional polygon meshes and texture maps would require a whopping 36 GB of VRAM. Yes, you read that right: a whopping 36 gigabytes of memory, even after factoring in compression and mesh optimization.
Procedural generation is what's keeping open-world wonders like No Man's Sky and Minecraft from eating up your hard drive, and now that developers can speed things up even more with GPU work graphs, game-changing research like this could pop up faster than you can say "Welcome to the Village."
Gaming, hardware, and Thomas the Tank Engine all share knick-knack space in Nick Evanson's memory, courtesy of their first meeting in 1981 on a Sinclair ZX81. He went on to become a physics teacher, but his writing bug returned and manifested in a stint at TechSpot.com, where he produced over 100 long articles on all things tech.
[1] Procedural generation of dense vegetation using GPU work graphs reduces memory requirements, maintains visual fidelity, and boosts real-time game graphics performance.
- The groundbreaking work on dense vegetation uses GPU work graphs, much like those in Direct3D and Vulkan, to manage its own workload and generate realistic vegetation from a miniscule 52 kB dataset.
- While procedural generation might not be new, the Coburg University wizards and their AMD partners have taken it to a new level, generating a forest's worth of trees, bushes, and leaves from just 52 kB, a mere fraction of the memory required for traditional polygon meshes and texture maps.
- If you're aiming for a mean frame rate of 60 fps, spending half of that time rendering a short view distance full of trees and bushes might not be ideal, but advancements in technology, such as this, are what drive progress, despite the costs.
- Procedural generation is crucial for keeping open-world games like No Man's Sky and Minecraft from overwhelming your hard drive, and with developers now able to speed things up using GPU work graphs, groundbreaking research like this could appear more frequently than you can say "Welcome to the Village."
- As technology advances, gadgets like smartphones and data-and-cloud-computing tools become increasingly integral to our daily lives, making it all the more impressive that university researchers and tech giants can create such realistic graphics using just 52 kB of data, barely larger than a single L1 cache block on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
