Lara Croft never looked better than in the new Crystal Dynamics PC game.
“AMD Graphics and Crystal Dynamics have partnered to revitalize one of video gaming’s most iconic characters, Lara Croft of the TOMB RAIDER franchise,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Graphics. “Developers at AMD and Crystal Dynamics collaborated tirelessly to leverage the power of AMD Radeon to develop the world’s first real-time hair physics system in a PC game. TressFX Hair combines advanced lighting, per-strand physics, and collision detection to bring unprecedented realism to this final frontier of image quality in PC gaming.”
Using DirectCompute to unlock the massively-parallel processing capabilities of the Graphics Core Next architecture, TressFX Hair enables the stunning image quality previously restricted to pre-rendered images. 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.
DirectCompute is additionally utilized to perform the real-time physics simulation 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.
