TressFX: A new frontier of Realism in PC gaming

I think a lot of that is true for the normally rendered hair, but it still looks a lot better than the default. And, yes, adding more elements based on physical conditions (adding mud, extra weight for being wet, etc.) are things that are being discussed and can be added (though not necessarily in this title).

For now, TressFX is a shampoo and conditioner, and its doing the job well by keeping her hair clean and shiny regardless of what she's going through!

 

That made me laugh

 

I dunno, I was underwhelmed by TressFX. It looks better, but it's still not right, it's still "uncanny valley". It's too light and fluffy, like feathers, and it flows around in weird ways. The ponytail sticks out too far in a straight line out the back of Lara's head, like she's got her hair wound around a two inch stick.

It's like when you play Dead Space 3. You've just killed these big monsters, and then you're stomping through them, and the body parts are flying around like they have no weight, sticking to all the wrong things like they are made of tissue paper and they have stuck themselves to your trousers because of static electricity. It's totally incongruous with how you expect things to behave, and TressFX is still having that problem.

If you want to get hair right, it doesn't swing around like it's made of liquid, or fine feathers, or tiny threads. It has some weight, some structure it bounces and moves with wind and movement, but it's all in relation to the person, not some independent squirming thing.

Take a look a Cameron Diaz's hair in "Knight & Day". Seriously, it looks like they spent a lot of time on her hair. It's moving and swishing about all the time, but it's within the context of her hairstyle, not some separate thing clinging to the back of her head. The movement is limited. When she swings her head, her hair moves only so far, and then bounces back. It doesn't fly around like an independent thing moving in a wind that isn't there for anything else.

 

I think I will reserve judgement on the tech until I can see the full scope of it in a stand alone tech demo.

Dave will they release a tech demo soon? Possibly for the launch of next gen cards?

 

I think AMD have taken a good first step, now they can slowly improve and refine it until we get some very realistic hair physics at low performance cost, also at low performance cost.

 

So basically unless it's CGI quality with perfect physics and motion, don't bother at all?

 

I certainly didn't write that.

There's a certain point where CGI becomes realistic. When your brain doesn't register it as looking like something real that we know and understand, but not behaving in the way that it should. TressFX is not there yet. In fact, it's more grating because hair is something we understand very well from the real world, so the fact that TressFX is not perfect jumps out at me dramatically and noticeably. Things can't just look right, they have to behave right too. TressFX in it's current form is certainly not as big a deal as is being made out.

So while I applaud AMD and Crystal Dynamics for making forward steps, TressFX doesn't live up to the hype. It's more realistic, but it's still has a ways to go to not be obviously jarring in an uncanny valley sort of way.

 

Would anyone like to comment on why this old hair tech in 3DMark03 was not-so-useful and not developed in games in any way?
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/79/3

 

Maybe because it used Havok.

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After checking out some of the gifs on gaf I think TressFX looks great. This could save virtual planets in the future by eliminating the excessive use of hair spray.

 

No one has cared enough to put in the effort, on top of needing more powerful hardware.

I hope AMD changes that with Tressfx though.

 

A directx based standard will certainly help surely.

 

Stream on PCper over ... definitively Tress could be better, but on some parts the result is just excellent ( ofc could be linked to humidity etc, but well you need some gpu time for render the game too ) .

I believe if we arrive to get the same result on the cutscenes where it feel more realist and more pushed on wind physic this will be a big gain for games in the next years.

Need say, the Lara haircut is not forcibly the most easy in term of physic, because naturally when you run, the head shake with this can directly feel like the hair are jumping around. ( i think the point here is this is the base used for the "standard " hair who bring mostly this ). There's something with the speed movement anyway, when you are walk or lean or the action is based close of the hair ( when approaching slowly a target, the result become really impressive )

 

Damnit. I played the first 9% of the game and didn't realized there was a separate setting for TressFX, I thought I just had to turn on Tessellation. No wonder I thought the hair looked ok, nothing we haven't seen before. lol.

Now that it's turned on, it definitely makes a big difference. Like individual strands of hair vs a clump of hair. The physics of the hair may be off, but I wish Femshep had hair this shiny and healthy.

 

Curious, in the benchmark the hair is blown from wrong direction, but in-game it's blown from correct direction in same scene

 

Are there any plans to make the physics simulation part of TressFX done on a separate GPU other than the one rendering the game?
Let's say.. offloading that task to the iGPU in an AMD APU?

 

TressFX uses DirectCompute, which IS a DirectX-based standard. However, Nvidia didn't get the game until last weekend to optimize driver support.

I'm sure they'll improve performance, but from what I read, Kepler's compute isn't as great as that in Southern Islands.

 

That is exactly what Malo was using as an argument for the hope that it (or some similar approach) may be used on a larger scale.

 

Oh, I think I read that incorrectly. Anyway, I never did really like proprietary standards like CUDA or PhysX because lock-in is never a good thing for the consumer in the long run.

 

http://forums.videocardz.com/topic/409-amd-tressfx-dx11-hair-physics/?p=1828

TressFX performance hit.

HD 6970 -35%
HD 7970 -33%
GTX 580 -28%
GTX 680 -27%

This is just one source but it doesn't look like TressFX is particularly hard on nVidia hardware. Also Fermi doesn't seem to be doing any better than Kepler. The problem with TombRaider on Geforces probably lies elsewhere.

 

Hmm... I didn't know that TressFX hits framerate so badly. I'm playing with a 7970 and still get a pretty good frame rate so it's harder to notice.