Following the recent tease, AMD has detailed its new TressFX technology aimed to create much more realistic hair in games. The new technology will debut in Tomb Raider 2013, making the hair of Lara Croft impressively more realistic.

According to the AMD blog that explains TressFX, it uses DirectCompute to unlock the processing capabilities of GCN architecture and is based on AMD's previous work on Order Independent Transparency (OIT), a method that makes use of Per-Pixel Linked-List (PPLL) data structures to manage rendering complexity and memory usage. The new TressFX for Hair has been developed in collaboration between AMD and Crystal Dynamic in order to bring quite an improvement to hair rendering and physics.

The blog post additionaly explains that DirectCompute is utilized to perform real-time physics simulations of TressFX Hair and treats each strand of hair as a chain with dozens of links thus allowing realistic influence of elements like gravity, wind and movement to Lara's hair. Each strand is also given a collision detection which ensures that strands will not pass through each other or any other solid surface.

According to what we can see from the blog post, AMD recommends the GCN-based AMD Radeon HD 7000 series as a particularly well equipped graphics card series for this type of task but did not exclude other GPUs either.

In any case, the effects on the hair certainly look impressive and we surely look forward to see what else can AMD pull off with this same TressFX technology and how open-source will it actually be.

You can check out the blog post here.