Microsoft’s Clustered Geometry shrinks ray tracing memory use from 4.7GB to 267MB in DirectX demo - eGamers.io
Microsoft's new Clustered Geometry feature reduces ray tracing memory usage from 4.7GB to 267MB, dramatically improving performance in a DirectX demo.
In a DirectX demonstration, Microsoft's Clustered Geometry feature enabled an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 to achieve 310 FPS, compared to just 1.4 FPS without the technology—a performance increase of approximately 221 times. The more significant improvement came in memory usage, where acceleration structures for ray tracing calculations shrank from 4,716 MB to 267 MB, representing a 94% reduction.
Memory Efficiency Breakthrough
The memory optimization represents the more substantial advancement. Rebuild times for these structures fell dramatically from 720 milliseconds to just 1 millisecond. These results come from independent researcher Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein, who tested using a technical demo specifically designed for Clustered Geometry, one of Microsoft's upgrades to DirectX Raytracing (DXR).
NVIDIA's Performance Lead
Testing showed NVIDIA's RTX 5080 achieving 310 FPS with Clustered Geometry enabled, while AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT reached 91 FPS on the same demo. This indicates NVIDIA's card performed about 3.4 times faster in this specific test, though the researcher noted this single synthetic workload doesn't determine overall ray tracing performance between the two brands.
Real-World Gaming Impact
Doederlein cautioned that the 221x performance increase won't translate directly to real games, which already use multiple optimization techniques. The benchmark represents a worst-case scenario demonstration rather than typical gameplay. The technology's real value may lie in enabling more complex path-traced environments without requiring proportional increases in processing power or VRAM.
The 221x figure measures how much headroom the technique creates in a worst-case scenario. It tells you nothing about the frame rate you'll get in a released game.
Current Availability
Clustered Geometry is already supported in recent NVIDIA drivers, while AMD offers a dedicated preview driver for compatible Radeon GPUs. Microsoft continues to develop these DirectX features through the Agility SDK 1.722 Preview. Until these technologies exit preview and developers integrate them into games, the demonstrated 267 MB memory usage remains a demo result rather than a real-world standard.
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