AMD Will Make Hair Prettier With TressFX Shampoo
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.




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.
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.
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.
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.
heres a quote from an eidos official
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
ROTFL ! I don't think anyone else has gotten this yet...
Bullet Physics API is OpenCL based and works on both AMD and NVidia cards.....just not widely used because game devs don't get financial incentives for using open source APIs...
HIS HAIRSTYLE WAS A CHOICE!!!!
That's why I was hoping EPIC or CRYTEK would implement something in their engines. Unreal engine is super popular for AAA titles and if Unreal engine 4 had GPU physics, developers wouldn't have to spend so much money for physics features. I think Bullet Physics was only used in 2 games, GTA and Hydrothunder, and both did not utilize GPU physics.
Also...does anyone else think than nvidia dumbed some of the game's explosions to make the physx accelerated stuff look better in comparison? That is my main gripe with gfx card makers providing incentives to use their tech. It can sometimes lead to...undesirable results. Don't get me wrong, the games come out great...it's just that sometimes companies may want to eliminate conflicts of interest.
(I think this article has gotten me to conspiracy theoristy).
the problem was it was a demo. nvidia never took the initiative to make it a reality.
Nvidia doesn't make games... it simply demonstrated that its hardware can do it. If developers weren't interested in taking advantage of it then so be it. But let's just keep it in perspective that nothing about doveFX, sorry, tressFX is new. It's marketing, not technology.