Lara Croft never looked better than in the new Crystal Dynamics PC game.
Since the dawn of the 3D era, realistic hair has been one of the most complex and challenging materials to accurately reproduce in real-time. Convincingly recreating a head of lively hair involves drawing tens of thousands of tiny and individual semi-transparent strands, each of which casts complex shadows and requires anti-aliasing. Even more challenging is that these calculations must be updated dozens of times per second to synchronize with the motion of a character.
When AMD Gaming Evolved and Crystal Dynamics agreed to co-develop a technology to address this massive challenge, they wanted to leverage the sensational compute capabilities of the Graphics Core Next architecture to revitalize the hair of an iconic game character: Lara Croft. Well-known for her daring personality and signature ponytail, reimagining Lara Croft (and her haircut) for the 2013 release of Tomb Raider wasn’t just an opportunity to modernize the character, it was an opportunity to advance PC gaming realism.
Through painstaking collaboration between software developers at AMD and Crystal Dynamics, Tomb Raider proudly features the world’s first real-time hair lighting and physics system in a playable PC game: TressFX Hair.
