One of the technical highlights of last year's Tomb Raider reboot was AMD's TressFX hair renderer which gave Lara a beautiful, physically-animated ponytail for the first time in her life.
AMD is now preparing for TressFX 2.0 debut with Lichdom: Battlemage, but not before pointing fingers towards NVIDIA's implementation of its own Hariworks hair rendering technology. According to AMD, TressFX performs exactly the same on both companies' cards while Hairworks is 7 times slower on AMD's cards for no technical reason.
TressFx 2.0 come with the following improvements:
• New functionality to support for grass and fur
• Continuous levels of details (LODs) are designed to improve performance by dynamically adjusting visual detail as TressFX-enabled objects move towards and away from the player’s POV
• Improved efficiency with many light sources and shaders via deferred rendering
• Superior self-shadowing for better depth and texture in the hair
• Even more robust scalability across GPUs of varying performance envelopes (vs. TressFX 1.0)
• Modular code and porting documentation
• Stretchiness now respects the laws of physics