Late last year, AMD released a paper introducing its new Dense Geometry Format (DGF) 3D graphics technology, designed to compete with NVIDIA’s RTX Mega Geometry. Today, the company is unveiling DGF SuperCompression (DGFS), a new compression technique within the DGF graphics stack, which reduces game geometry file sizes by up to 22% compared to standard DGF. With DGFS, AMD aims to achieve an average 22% reduction in compressed game asset streams when GDeflate is applied. This results in significantly smaller asset sizes, allowing for larger games without the need for expanded storage. As games now often require hundreds of gigabytes of installation space, compressing storage formats is a key strategy to fit more games on your PC without immediately needing additional storage. A 22% reduction in file size through proprietary compression makes installation sizes much more manageable.
However, it’s important to note that since DGFS is a compression format for DGF, the mesh stream array produced by DGFS must be decoded before the game can load it. It’s similar to a ZIP file, which you can’t use until it’s unzipped. DGFS data will behave in the same way, residing only in PC storage, not in memory as it is not a component that will be directly processed by the GPU. AMD has developed a CPU-based decoding process that decodes the compressed DGFS assets in real time during asset streaming, which AMD claims “should be sufficiently fast.” There are also potential GPU-based decoding solutions, suggesting we might see faster implementations in the future when it hits software SDKs.
As a reminder, AMD initially introduced its block-based DGF geometry format as a way to significantly enhance geometric detail in 3D graphics, surpassing even current raster methods like tessellation. It achieves this by minimizing the resource footprint of geometry, packing small mesh pieces—up to 64 vertices and 64 triangles—into 128-byte blocks that serve as compact containers for geometry, vertex positions, and light topology. This technology operates on GPU hardware with specific geometry processing, and DGFS further compresses these files for efficient placement on SSDs or HDDs. AMD tested its DGFS features on a system with a Ryzen 9 7950X, 64 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, and a Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU. This suggests that the RDNA 4 architecture will likely support the DGF graphics stack, without requiring RDNA 5 or UDNA IP to function.