How tetrahedral cages significantly reduce BVH memory usage
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Holger Gruen
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Holger Gruen's September 2026 AMD GPUOpen article explains tetrahedral cages for ray tracing dense, independently animated geometry while keeping triangle BVHs static. A demo video shows about 25,000 animated plants on large terrain at 60+ FPS on a Radeon RX 9070 XT.
Dense meshes sit inside deformable cages so animation updates cage vertices only; rays transform to a reference frame before hitting static triangles. Reported cage updates use roughly 1.7 GB and 3.3 ms per frame versus far higher BLAS rebuild cost for the same complexity.
Advanced DXR/Vulkan ray tracing engineers evaluating foliage or massive instanced animation are the core audience.
GPUOpen hosts the article free with links to a technical paper and companion implementation notes.
Cited when discussing alternatives to per-instance BLAS rebuilds for deformable instances.
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