A trillion triangles, animated and path traced
Jungle Ruins puts real-time path tracing inside a dense, animated rainforest: trees, undergrowth, ancient stonework and one trillion instanced triangles. Traverse contributed to the research and engineering effort behind Intel Labs’ project.
In Path Tracing a Trillion Triangles, Anton Sochenov and his Intel Labs co-authors report 30 FPS at 1440p on an Intel Arc B580 GPU, using one-sample-per-pixel path tracing with neural denoising and supersampling. Intel credits Traverse Research among the project’s contributors.
Geometry is only part of the problem
The scene combines millions of mesh instances, animated foliage, fine geometric detail and alpha-tested vegetation. Keeping it interactive means managing the cost of animation and ray-tracing acceleration structures alongside shading, memory traffic and image reconstruction.
Jungle Ruins. Intel Labs, figure 7 of Path Tracing a Trillion Triangles.
Intel’s approach traces one sample per pixel and one ray at each bounce, then uses a joint neural denoising and supersampling model to reconstruct the image. For dynamic geometry, the team partitions the top-level acceleration structure into fragments that can be updated independently, reducing the cost of updating the entire scene.
Partitioning instances into TLAS fragments. Intel Labs, figure 8 of Path Tracing a Trillion Triangles.
Read Intel’s dynamic-geometry deep dive.
Explore the scene and the research
Intel makes Jungle Ruins available as a GPU research sample in Blender and USD formats. The Amazon Rainforest-inspired environment contains over one trillion total triangles and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence through Intel’s sample library.
Get the Jungle Ruins sample from Intel · Read Path Tracing a Trillion Triangles.
Scene and screenshots: Intel. The reported performance describes Intel Labs’ research demonstration, including its reconstruction pipeline. Article authors: Anton Sochenov, Manu Mathew Thomas, Cristiano Siqueira, Gabor Liktor and Akshay Jindal (5 May 2025).