Are AMD users left high and dry?

[flyingsaucers]

Are AMD users left high and dry?

We've all seen Geralt's gorgeous new hair, but for all the hype re: hairworks, I haven't heard a peep about AMD's hair tech TressFX, which means that AMD users get to look forward to that stiff straw-basket-head hair of TW2? And the wolves, bears, furry monsters, etc, are they all going to look flat & plasticky for gamers who didn't buy the right brand of video card? Because that would be really lame.

 

[azrael.1289]

TressFX sucked in Tomb Raider. With all it's clipping and blinking in and out of existence, it broke immersion instead of adding to it. I haven't seen it in any other game.

As to hair in W3 without Nvidia, the developers have said they have worked a lot on their own tech to make the hair look awesome. It obviously won't be as good as hairworks but should still look good.

 

[arkhenon]

There won't be fur on the creatures, that's for sure. But for the hair, CDPR also have an in-house technique that's not as taxing as HairWorks, and which can work on all platforms. Most of the time that you saw Geralt's hair, it was actually this in house system (Check the videos where there the HairWorks is clearly disabled - no fur on monsters/wolves, and you'll see).

 

[Scholdarr.452]

We've all seen Geralt's gorgeous new hair, but for all the hype re: hairworks, I haven't heard a peep about AMD's hair tech TressFX, which means that AMD users get to look forward to that stiff straw-basket-head hair of TW2? And the wolves, bears, furry monsters, etc, are they all going to look flat & plasticky for gamers who didn't buy the right brand of video card? Because that would be really lame.

Just watch console footage. The looks of hair and fur there will be comparable tothe looks of hair and fur if you use an AMD GPU on PC.

 

[Stiler]

IIRC AMD can run hairworks (just like you can run Tressfx if you are using Nvidia). However performance wise it will be more taxing compared to using Nvidia.

How much more? We don't know and won't until we get some benchmarks out of the game.

 

[sidspyker]

HairWorks works on AMD and no, even without HairWorks the game has nice looking hair.

 

[mxYELLOW]

You cannot have 2 proprietary tech on a single game. In this case we have Nvidia Hairworks.
And I wouldn't mind turning Hairworks off if it eats half of systems performance.

 

[azrael.1289]

You cannot have 2 proprietary tech on a single game. In this case we have Nvidia Hairworks.
And I wouldn't mind turning Hairworks off if it eats half of systems performance.

Yeah, hairworks was a major resource hog in Farcry 4.

 

[Salulu]

Hairworks is done using DirectCompute, it's hardware agnostic, meaning it runs on both Nvidia and AMD cards.
http://physxinfo.com/wiki/HairWorks
If you can take a look at Far Cry 4 benchmarks for the HairWorks setting, you'll see that they both take a pretty similar hit to performance, about 10fps, of course this performance hit is based on them looking at only one animal, but it gets the general idea across to how well it performs between card vendors. I don't think AMD users have anything to worry about.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/01/12/far_cry_4_graphics_features_performance_review/5

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

DirectCompute is useless outside Windows, so Hairworks won't work with GPU acceleration for Nvidia users on Linux anyway. So AMD users aren't alone

 

[tahirahmed]

We've all seen Geralt's gorgeous new hair, but for all the hype re: hairworks, I haven't heard a peep about AMD's hair tech TressFX, which means that AMD users get to look forward to that stiff straw-basket-head hair of TW2? And the wolves, bears, furry monsters, etc, are they all going to look flat & plasticky for gamers who didn't buy the right brand of video card? Because that would be really lame.

HairWorks work on AMD graphic cards just like TressFX works on Nvidia cards. I tested it on my R9 290 with FarCry 4 and it works flawlessly with performance hit similar to GTX 970 so you don't have to worry about it.

As for TressFX it is being used but in less popular titles or titles that we haven't seen on PC. TressFX 1.0 debuted in Tomb Raider 2013, then TressFX 2.0 was used in Tomb Raider Definitive Edition which was console exclusive thus we didn't saw it on PC. It was also used in Lichdom Battlemage and now TressFX 3.0 is announced for Dues Ex Mankind Divided (this is the second big title that can make a difference for TressFX).

 

[Mekari]

HairWorks work on AMD graphic cards just like TressFX works on Nvidia cards. I tested it on my R9 290 with FarCry 4 and it works flawlessly with performance hit similar to GTX 970 so you don't have to worry about it.

Are you saying that if hairworks is on then a R9 290 would have a performance considerable to a GTX 970? Would you say that a R9 290x would be similar?

 

[moonknightgog]

AMD has chosen the console side.

 

[sidspyker]

Are you saying that if hairworks is on then a R9 290 would have a performance considerable to a GTX 970? Would you say that a R9 290x would be similar?

The performance hit of HairWorks is the same on both GPU brands is what he's saying.

 

[Scholdarr.452]

The performance hit of HairWorks is the same on both GPU brands is what he's saying.

In theory, yes. But much depends on drivers and optimization here.

 

[Persei8]

Is the physics and hairworks not being handled by the CPU?

 

[Scholdarr.452]

Is the physics and hairworks not being handled by the CPU?

The interaction between GPU and CPU is quite complex. And you can use Nvidia GPUs just for Physx but most of it runs on the CPU. I'm not so sure about hairworks but since it's indeed a graphical thing I'd guess it's computed on the GPU.

 

[Persei8]

Then you people need to be clear in this thread. This thread is about AMD, hairworks, physics. If you using AMD then hairworks and physics will be handled by the CPU. If you using AMD make sure your CPU is really good.

 

[akab584]

Then you people need to be clear in this thread. This thread is about AMD, hairworks, physics. If you using AMD then hairworks and physics will be handled by the CPU. If you using AMD make sure your CPU is really good.

I have an "old" i7 902 - Quadcore / 8 Threads @ 2.6ghz
with a R9 290-X.

I hope that my cpu will have enough bruteforce to hold the phys and that the ram-bus at 1066mhz is enough to handle all that realtime fur.

 

[Scholdarr.452]

Hairworks is computed on the GPU in both cases, not only on Nvidia GPUs. It's a part of the DX12 renderer and DirectCompute. Actually it's "just" an advanced tesselation technique.

NVIDIA HairWorks is a component of NVIDIA GameWorks™. Simulation and rendering of fur in real-time adds to the realism of animals and furry characters. HairWorks can run on any DX11 capable GPU.

https://developer.nvidia.com/content/nvidia-hairworks-tools-released

We have to see how it runs on AMD tech. The obvious problem - according to AMD - is that the code isn't available (like every other Gameworks library) to AMD so they can't optimize their hardware and drivers to make optimal use of the technique in the respective game.

NVIDIA’s Hairworks technology is seven times slower on AMD hardware with no obvious route to achieve cross-vendor optimizations as enabled by open access to TressFX source. As the code for Hairworks cannot be downloaded, analyzed or modified, developers and enthusiasts alike must suffer through unacceptably poor performance on a significant chunk of the industry’s graphics hardware.

You can read about AMD's view on the topic here: http://community.amd.com/community/amd-blogs/amd-gaming/blog/2014/09/23/tressfx-hair-cross-platform-and-v20


So no, Hairworks isn't running on your CPU if you have an AMD GPU. Only Physx is doing so and Hairworks isn't part of Physx.