AMD Will Make Hair Prettier With TressFX Shampoo

News
By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

It looks like AMD might be releasing its own physics engine, starting with advanced hair rendering.

AMD has announced a new TressFX hair simulation technology. AMD accomplished this in collaboration with Square Enix's studio, Crystal Dynamics. The goal of this is to give the viewers more dynamic hair physics, particularly Lara Croft's hair in the newest Tomb Raider.

The technology would be exclusive to AMD Radeon DirectX 11 graphics cards, and only those that fall under the Gaming Evolved promotion.

TressFX will provide realism to hair rendering in ways that otherwise can only be done with CGI or pre-rendered scenes. The trick to this is DirectCompute, allowing much better visuals with a minimal impact on CPU performance. The technology is similar to Nvidia's PhysX, making the GPU do the computations rather than the CPU. Need a teaser? See below!

For more info, check out AMD's blog.

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Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

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66 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dudewitbow
    Just as a statement, its probably not exclusive like this article says. going to quote the blog specifically:

    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.


    leading to my assumption that any card can run it, its just that GCN being compute monsters can utilize it much more easily than other choices, as this effect uses DirectCompute, which gpus should have.
    Reply
  • joecole1572
    Finally?

    As an AMD video card owner, I am happy that there may be a physx alternative for me. But, I wish someone would make an OpenCL physics alternative that could be run on both nvidia and AMD cards. Who knows, maybe EPIC or CRYTEK can come up with a solution so that we can have a real GPU accelerated physics based game instead of these eye candy enhancements that nvidia and AMD are selling.
    Reply
  • ikes9711
    Best slogan ever.
    Reply
  • plznote
    I want to grow a beard, but the hair doesn't come.
    Reply
  • joecole1572
    dudewitbowJust as a statement, its probably not exclusive like this article says. going to quote the blog specifically:leading to my assumption that any card can run it, its just that GCN being compute monsters can utilize it much more easily than other choices, as this effect uses DirectCompute, which gpus should have.
    Ah. I still wouldn't rule out AMD running a check to see if you are running an nvidia card and disabling the feature if you are. It's just like how you can't run physx on a system with an AMD as the primary card and an nvidia as a physx card. The nvidia gpu can do physx...but nvidia won't let you because you bought their competitor's card.

    Time will tell and I'll try to be optimistic.
    Reply
  • zorky9
    Woohoo! Hope this works with Hitman.
    Reply
  • dudewitbow
    joecole1572Ah. I still wouldn't rule out AMD running a check to see if you are running an nvidia card and disabling the feature if you are. It's just like how you can't run physx on a system with an AMD as the primary card and an nvidia as a physx card. The nvidia gpu can do physx...but nvidia won't let you because you bought their competitor's card.Time will tell and I'll try to be optimistic.

    heres a quote from an eidos official
    No there should not be. AMD has always been quite clear about that as well. We are working on features that are specific to the PC platform, but if they are DX11 features they will also work on Nvidia DX11 hardware.

    And while we support features like Eyefinity that does not mean we do not support features like Surround for Nvidia.

    http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=133239&page=2
    Reply
  • joecole1572
    Some other tech sites are saying that this will work on nvidia cards. If they are right, we might see gpu accelerated physics go mainstream!
    Reply
  • helz IT
    This is not AMD exclusive: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardwar.../amd-tressfx/1
    Reply
  • helz IT
    Sorry, here's the link: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2013/02/26/amd-tressfx/1
    Reply