A research paper from High-Performance Graphics 2026 introduces a technique for ray tracing hundreds of millions of animated triangles in real time by decoupling animation cost from triangle count. The method wraps meshes in low-resolution tetrahedral cages; only the cage is animated per frame, while static mini-BLASes for the underlying geometry are built once and reused. Rays entering an animated tetrahedron are transformed into rest-pose space to intersect the static geometry. This approach dramatically reduces per-frame BVH update costs and memory usage, enabling a scene of ~585 million animated triangles at 60 FPS on an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT at 1080p. It is best suited for swaying vegetation, grass, crowds, and animation LOD, and can integrate with DirectX Raytracing partitioned top-level acceleration structures. AMD plans to release DXR samples and a header-only C++ library for building tetrahedral cages.
