DGF: A Dense, Hardware-Friendly Geometry Format for Lossily Compressing Meshlets with Arbitrary Topologies

The widespread availability of hardware accelerated ray tracing solutions is driving a gradual sea-change in the real-time graphics space. The major graphics APIs now offer standardized support for accelerated ray tracing. In the same time frame, rasterization-based systems such as Nanite [Karis et al. 2021] have significantly raised geometric complexity in games. The state of the art in raster graphics now enables lossy compressed geometry representations that are decoded on the-fly during rendering. This trend conflicts with current ray tracing interfaces, which require opaque acceleration structures to be built from uncompressed input data. This paper seeks to close the gap by defining a block-compressed geometry format that is designed for arbitrary geometry topologies and can be directly consumed by future fixed-function hardware.