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No More Bad Hair Days with AMD TressFX Hair Rendering Technology!

By Wong Chung Wee - on 27 Feb 2013, 10:30am

No More Bad Hair Days with AMD TressFX Hair Rendering Technology!

AMD has unveiled details about TressFX Hair that is its new, cutting-edge rendering technology that is touted to be able to create life-like locks in real time. It leverages on the DirectCompute to harness the parallel processing prowess of its AMD's GCN-based GPUs.

(Image Source: AMD)

TressFX Hair is the result of a partnership between AMD and Crystal Dynamics; the game studio who was tasked to build games based on the popular Tomb Raider franchise in 2003. For the images we have seen from the AMD blog, it is no surprise that Lara Croft, the protagonist, has given up her trademark braided ponytail in favor of flowing locks of finely-rendered hair.

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 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.

Although there are no details on the exclusivity of TresFX Hair on AMD GCN-based graphics card, we can safely assume that the new hair rendering technology will also work on NVIDIA GPUs that support DirectCompute. For more information, do head to AMD's blog here.

(Source: AMD, videogaming247, Wikipedia)

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