AMD in a partnership withSquare Enix's studio Crystal Dynamics has announced their new TressFX Hair Simulation Technology. The new TressFX Hair Simulation Technology is aimed to provide dynamic hair physics and simulation to Lara Croft's hair in her latestadventurer'sin Tomb Raider (2013).

Exclusive to AMD Radeon DirectX 11 GPUs and falling under their AMD Gaming Evolved promotion, the new TressFX aims to provide a new frontier of realism to PC gamers using AMD GPUs. What TressFX does is provide much realism to hair rendering and simulation which can only beacquiredin CGI or pre-rendered scenes. This is achieved by putting the load on the GPU utilizing its DirectCompute tech. Hence you get much better visuals at a minimal performance cost.

This new technology is similar to NVIDIA's PhysX which puts the simulation and physics rendering load on the GPU compute unit instead of the CPU which in returns provides better performance at minimal performance cost. You can check out the screenshots of the latest Tomb Raider with AMD TressFX Hair simulation technology enabled in the screens below:

Press Release

BAD HAIR DAYS

Since the dawn of the 3D era, characters in your favorite games have largely featured totally unrealistic hair: blocky and jagged, often without animation that matches your character’s movements. Many games have attempted to disguise the problem with short haircuts, updos, or even unremovable helmets. But why? Simply: realistic hair is one of the most complex and challenging materials to accurately reproduce in real-time. 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.

A NEW FRONTIER OF REALISM

Lara Croft is an iconic character with an equally iconic ponytail. Re-imagining Lara (and her haircut) for the2013 release of Tomb Raiderwasn’t just an opportunity to modernize the character, it was an opportunity to substantially advance in-game realism by tackling the long-standing challenge of unrealistic hair. Through painstaking collaboration between software developers at AMD andCrystal Dynamics, Tomb Raider proudly features the world’s first real-time hair rendering technology in a playable game: TressFX Hair.

THE SCIENCE OF TRESSFX HAIR

TressFX Hair revolutionizes Lara Croft’s locks by using theDirectCompute programming languageto unlock the massively-parallel processing capabilities of the Graphics Core Next architecture, enabling image quality previously restricted to pre-rendered images. Building on AMD’s previous work onOrder Independent Transparency(OIT), this method makes use of Per-Pixel Linked-List (PPLL) data structures to manage rendering complexity and memory usage.DirectCompute is additionally utilized to perform the real-time physics simulations for TressFX Hair. This physics system treats each strand of hair as a chain with dozens of links, permitting for forces like gravity, wind and movement of the head to move and curl Lara’s hair in a realistic fashion. Further, collision detection is performed to ensure that strands do not pass through one another, or other solid surfaces such as Lara’s head, clothing and body. Finally, hair styles are simulated by gradually pulling the strands back towards their original shape after they have moved in response to an external force. Graphics cards featuring the Graphics Core Next architecture, like selectAMD 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. More information here!