Anyone who is interested in realistic real-time graphics, be it in games or animation, will know that dense vegetation can be very costly on GPU resources. They either eat up lots of VRAM or shader time, or both. A team of university researchers and AMD staff have come up with a solution, though, that procedurally generates almost 36 GBs worth of realistic trees, branches, and leaves from just 52 kB of data.
The work of the team was submitted to the Eurographics Association's High-Performance Graphics 2025 Symposium (via Compusemble), and naturally for such an audience, it's a very complex read. But the gist of it goes like this: the algorithm uses work graphs on the GPU to procedurally generate realistic vegetation from just a tiny block of starting data. Specifically, 52 kB of data—less than a quarter of the size of a single L1 cache block of the GPU, a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which the research group used to test their code.
