AMD reveals what ‘TressFX’ is: a very cool-looking new hair rendering system
By Tim Colwill on February 27, 2013 at 5:23 pm
Yesterday’s tease from AMD promised a revolution in PC gaming realism, and AMD have delivered… a new hair-rendering system. Sounds weird? It actually looks super impressive, and AMD are debuting it in the PC version of Tomb Raider. Don’t worry though, it’ll work on NVIDIA cards as well — all DX11 cards will be supported.
“TressFX Hair revolutionizes Lara Croft’s locks by using the DirectCompute programming language to unlock the massively-parallel processing capabilities of the Graphics Core Next architecture, enabling image quality previously restricted to pre-rendered images,” reads AMD’s announcement. “Building on AMD’s previous work on Order Independent Transparency (OIT), this method makes use of Per-Pixel Linked-List (PPLL) data structures to manage rendering complexity and memory usage.”
Check out the before-and-after pictures below for some promising comparisons (click for larger).
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Pretty sweet, will be intersting to see if the physics works as god intended when it comes out as well.
It’s rad that it works on nvidia cards too. Nvidia need to try and get a deal going for physx on ATI.
I’d like to see some video of that in action. Yes the screens look good but it doesn’t really show enough, what it looks like in motion is more important.
Makes her hair look far too clean imo
Me too – comes out march 5, so not long now. I wonder if it’s in any of their trailers already?
Agreed. Looks nice but a bit out of context. Wonder if there is a grease modifier? :P
Good guy AMD, not being a d!ck over who can use their graphics technologies. Hopefully this tech gets widespread use showing nVidia that if they would open up PhysX more studios would use it.
If it works on Nvidia cards its got nothing to do with AMD cards its just code, yes you made it well done dont say we need a AMD card to get it to run, back to Nvidia and wait for their Pantene attempt.
Um, hands up if you also cant tell the difference :)
Reminds me of those old HD tv adds
——
“This is what your TV looks like now”
*shows random scene*
“And this is what it would look like on a HD TV”
*shows the exact same scene*
——
Maybe those looked different if you alreay owned a HD tv, but i doubt it :)
coatsy22,
Were you looking at those comparisons on a potato? There is quite a big and very noticeable difference.
No one said it did – it’s just that AMD have done the R&D on this tech.
It would be great, however unlike this hair tech, physx requires actual hardware to run, so ATI would have to change their cards as opposed to Nvidia just letting them run it.
elliotengi,
Not really. You can already get the CPU to run PhysX it just runs like poop because CPU’s aren’t powerful enough. I would imagine only driver level optimizations would be needed to get PhysX running on AMD video cards.
coatsy22,
Yeah I remember ads like that. Only thing was I was watching those ads on an older def TV so of course there wasn’t any difference. Silly ads really when you think about it.
The hair song popped into my head while reading this
Yeah, I’m really interested to know what it can do when introducing a games environment into it – such as getting wet, or dynamic modification (fire).
Additionally… please, please PLEASE let this be adapted to things like foliage and trees. That would be so awesome.
I agree. Cool technology but not the right demo for it
elliotengi,
It is a pity GoN missed the best quote of the lot: “We don’t create features that lock out other vendors.”
And that, folks, is why I am in bed with AMD…
Woop, wont have to sell off my 690 now. :>
Just ordered a 7870 for my mini-itx build as well, so I’ll be getting Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite for free! :D
Hopefully it’s a bit less clean looking in motion. I really hope they tweak it to just be a bit less reflective, if nothing else. Real hair only looks like that in studio lighting.
Key words being “real hair’ :p
You’re right about the cpu thing, but I’m incredulously doubtful that driver optimizations would get it running on ati without hardware modification and or radically re-written code.
I think you’re wrong, but you might be right.
PinothyJ,
Won’t lie – I’m in bed with NVidia for cuda, PhysX, and 3dvision. Used to go ati all the time, but those features got me. For the benefit of gamers and the evolution of the industry, I wish NVidia would try and make a deal with ati on PhysX.
Nvidia did try to get ATI to use PhysX many years ago but ATI refused for a number of reasons. It was partially that ATI did not want to become dependant on their main rival’s proprietary software but mostly because PhysX was just not that great at the time.
The latest versions of PhysX actually do use SSE and multithreading and all that jazz, but that wasn’t the case when Nvidia was trying to convince ATI to use the software.
Additionally, you wouldn’t need to make any physical changes to current-gen AMD cards to allow them to run PhysX; only software changes.
The current implementation of PhysX relies on CUDA; AMD cards can run Khronos’ OpenCL and Microsoft’s DirectCompute, both of which are not significantly different from CUDA (and the latter of which powers TressFX). The main difference is that CUDA is Nvidia exclusive and very well marketed.
There’s no technical reason why PhysX could not be extended to support OpenCL/DirectCompute nor is there any reason why AMD couldn’t write their own equivalent of PhysX that would deliver similar performance without making architectural changes to their hardware.
exe3 said it runs off a CPU like poop because CPU’s aren’t powerful enough. Well no offence but that’s like saying a trowl can dig a hole in a field but an excavator is better because it’s bigger.
You are comparing apples and oranges. GPU’s are great at number crunching, but they aren’t good at running the guts of a computer. CPU’s can run the guts of a computer but aren’t as fast as GPU’s at pure number crunching, so with PhysX specifically written for CUDA on nVidia GPU’s, it’s not going to play nice with either AMD GPU’s or CPU’s.
Oh and if you want PhysX with your AMD, just grab a second hand crappy nVidia card (those 9600GT’s are pretty damn cheap now…) and run them with the PhysX enabler and you can laugh at the extra people pay for the nVidia. PhysX was and still is a gimmick. It doesn’t do anything other than the odd bit of flag waving or a bullet ricochet here and there. If it was applied to full cloth effects on character models as well as a ton of other stuff because it can it would damage that game’s target market, technically forcing them to use nVidia to see the best of the game.
Dev’s don’t use it much primarily for that reason, so nVidia’s plan backfired a bit. AMD refused it and rightly so as nVidia would have controlled them had they agreed.
At the end of the day this TressFX is based on DC power, which the 7970 can do at 1TP/s and the Titan can do at 1.3TP/s. This is because DC doesn’t get scaled over the base clock of the card. So we are back at AMD being the value for money way to make things look and play well.
Maybe its MAYBELEENE…
My brain hurts reading this.
I have a very strong feeling we’ll be seeing more of this next month at GDC ;)
Yeah… but where is the BoobPhys tech? Priorities guys, c’mon!
Should we be giving AMD all the credit?
By collaboration I think they mean Crystal Dynamics implementing it into their game and thus helping test it rather than them actually co-creating the tech.
OK maybe I should have stated “traditionally” but the working pipelines of GPU’s vs CPU’s is very different. The full explanation wouldn’t fit in a comments section, nor would it be a short read ;)
elliotengi,
PhysX works better on a quad core CPU than it does on a dedicated GPU, according to an Intel white paper and Tom’s Hardware. Of course, NVIDIA have, not only, coded it so it will be bottlenecked on a CPU, but the kits given to developers encourage lazy PhysX implementation that further cements this GPU dependant.
I refuse to support a company that is this petty and pathetic to the point that they would rather hinder the performance of their technology than support the industry as a whole.
I am AMD because it is not NVIDIA…