Tomb Raider TressFX Hair – Gimmick or Necessary Feature?
Summary:
3.4
There been quite a furore over the implementation of TressFX Hair by AMD and Crystal Dynamics for Lara Croft, the main character in the recently release action-adventure reboot of Tomb Raider. The technology – which utilises the DirectCompute programming language – enables real-time simulation of hair, which means that the latter is affected by factors like wind, rain, movement and gravity. As you can see in the video below, the tech performs quite well in that aspect and prevents clipping issues between the hair and the body.
However, there are a couple of drawbacks to this tech I have noticed so far. Firstly, the performance hit is quite noticeable (especially on Nvidia video cards), given that it necessitates the rendering of hair in real-time. However, one hopes that since TressFX is GPU-based, it will likely improve with updated drivers and newer graphics cards (obviously). More importantly, I noticed that with the feature turned on, the hair seemed over-responsive to elements such as wind, which is a bit strange given that TressFX is supposed to increase the realism factor. However, this is something that even a few of my gamer friends have noticed as well, and hence don’t feel that the precious frame-rate loss justifies the use of this feature right now. What are your thoughts? If you have not purchased Tomb Raider yet, you can just watch the video above to see the implementation of the tech in the game.
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