AMD unveils TressFX hair rendering technology (pics)

Earlier this week, some of you may have seen the teasers regarding AMD's TressFX physics and rendering technology. Today, the chip-maker unveiled details about TressFX -- its new toolset for creating life-like locks. The system promises a future for gamers...

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I have to admit, her hair does look good! nice to see someone is making progress in this area!

Isnt this basically like nvidias CUDA hair?

Can't wait to see what Agent 47 looks like with this technology.

[Edit]
PCPer reports "I asked AMD a couple of questions including if this was going to be a technology that NVIDIA users would be missing out on. Their response? "We don't create features that lock out other vendors." "

Full Article:
http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-...Use-TressFX-bring-GPU-Compute-Hair-Simulation
[/Edit]

Nvidia had tech demos showing they can do hair on many occassions. They have worked with developers to arrive to specific effects in games, but it does not look like they pushed specific examples of the technology in which all developers can leverage, as a tools. There is Nvidia Apex??

Maybe they have Hair in the Apex toolset, which includes Physx support??? - I'm not sure. It does seem AMD is (for a change) being agressive, at least for a new hair tool.

I must say I would want the hair version after seeing it without. I cannot go back now! I hope Nvidia has worked with Crystal Dynamics for a shader branch for hair on Geforce or I will be not happy... ... no really.. not happy >:|

I wonder if this will be available in the new xbox and ps4 consoles. It should be.

http://blogs.amd.com/play/tressfx/

Wow... graphics cards on conditioners... I like!!

I must say I like this. It was getting pretty lame with the sausage-roll-like hair clipped to a persons head. And this is especially important for Tomb Raider [being a fan of the franchise] I can tell you this has been lacking.

New hair tech, the best kind of graphics benchmarking! On a side note, Lara Croft running around in a muddy jungle probably wouldn't have hair straight from a Garnier commercial.

How about some realistic skin textures? I find the blowup doll aspect more annoying in games today than chunky hair.

Well well lookey there, beautiful waving hair. It waves so nicely I feel like waving back. Seriously though, I'm glad to see somebody's at last doing something about the lousy textures we always see. Now if only they could also do something about the in-game character finger dexterity among other things.

Haha! Do you remember GTA: SA? everyone's hands were stuck together and barely moved! Things have moved on a little bit since but not much.

I hope this new gen of console will push stuff like this forward, since the polygon count is now higher than ever on characters and we can make old men look emotional I hope in the next few years we see fingers move individually and skin tones that look realistic, I think its now possible

As I do tend to watch those trends, in regard to my work, this one is very nice thing to see! This is not realistic as CAD and pre-rendered hair goes, but a huge advancement over the previous low-poly generation. I just hope for two things: optimized (fast simulation) and cross-platform availability. I do own a couple of Nvidia cards, mainly for CUDA - for advanced video editing effects. I would love this on an Nvidia card, for gaming purposes though.

I hope they make it cross platform too, but I'd just like to point out the irony. You purchased Nvidia for an exclusive feature yet you dislike exclusivity. haha

Hmm I don't get it, I thought Nvidia already did something like this before, its even almost called the same: tesselation

Here is a link from 2008! www.nvidia.ca/object/siggraph-2008-hair.html

There is also countless tech demo's on youtube about it.

Yes I do. I was actually thinking of the opening cut scene with Sonny in GTA Vice City when I posted this.

Just picked up a 7930 aka 7870 Tahiti.cant wait to see this in action.

great card indeed