Tomb Raider Reboot Will Be More Realistic With TressFX
AMD announced that they have been working with Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics to create a new technology that generates the most realistic hair seen to date in a video game. The technology is called TressFX. With it, physics and collision detection can be done for each individual strand of hair, according to AMD. AMD goes on to explain how AMD Radeon cards, specifically the Radeon 7000 line, are best suited for the technology.
AMD says that, until now, realistic hair has been out of reach of games designers to implement as it’s one of the “most complex and challenging materials to accurately reproduce in real-time.” A new blog post on the AMD Game Blog says that games characters have historically tended to be very fond of wearing helmets or seem to overindulge in hairspray. This is because “Convincingly recreating a head of lively hair involves drawing tens of thousands of tiny and individual semi-transparent strands, each of which casts complex shadows and requires anti-aliasing. Even more challengingly, these calculations must be updated dozens of times per second to synchronize with the motion of a character”.
It is refreshing to see AMD take initiviate and promote how their cards work best with certain games, like Tomb Raider, and how they have been working with developers to get the best performance out of their cards. nVidia has been promoting their "The Way It’s Meant To Be Played" campaign with seemingly every PC game of the last decade. I’m personally pleased to see some competition in this arena.
However, unlike with some nVidia technologies, such as PhysX, TressFX will not be limited to AMD graphics cards. Any DirectX 11 GPU, whether it be from AMD or nVidia, will be able to take advantage of the technology.
What if you have an NVIDIA graphics card?
If you want to have a good hair day the AMD Game Blog suggests “Graphics cards featuring the Graphics Core Next architecture, like select AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series, are particularly well-equipped to handle these types of tasks, with their combination of fast on-chip shared memory and massive processing throughput on the order of trillions of operations per second”. However, what if you have NVIDIA hardware? Bit-Tech contacted AMD about this very question and a spokesperson replied “TressFX is not exclusive to AMD, it works on any DirectX11 card, similar to some other AMD-built technologies - for example Order-Independent Transparency (OIT) or High Definition Ambient Occlusion (HDAO).” So it looks like if you have a decent NVIDIA card you can also enjoy TressFX hair in games.
Overall the stills look great but it’s a pity there isn’t a video to show off the realism mentioned in the blurb.
Tomb Raider
TressFX hair is affected by gravity, wind and movement and has been designed to react in a realistic fashion. We are told that Lara’s pony tail reacts more realistically than ever as she leaps and bounds around the in game scenery. AMD has also implemented realistic wet and dry hair – it reacts to the effects of moisture in the game environments. Have a look through the pictures and see what you think.
Tomb Raider is looking very good on PC, and this new TressFX technology demonstrates that if you have a powerful and capable machine, the PC version is for you. Here’s some screenshots if you’re not quite convinced:
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| Tomb Raider (2013) with TressFX |
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| Comparison of Tomb Raider without and with TressFX |
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