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Nvidia cards struggling with AMD hair tech in Tomb Raider

Jon Martindale March 7, 2013 Graphics, Software & Gaming

We talked about AMD's new TressFX hair technology last week, showing of what it's capable of doing and debuting the fact that it would see its first outing in the new Tomb Raider game. Well now that game has hit the shelves and been installed on many a PC: and Nvidia GPU users are having trouble with it.

Now it might be understandable that Nvidia cards aren't the best at rendering an AMD technology, but it seems like there was some underhanded behaviour from the game makers on this one, as Nvidia didn't receive the game code until a few days before release and therefore couldn't release an optimised driver.

TressFX
It's a shame the hair isn't working out, as the new TressFX looks great in these preview images.

“Unfortunately, Nvidia didn't receive final game code until this past weekend which substantially decreased stability, image quality and performance over a build we were previously provided,” spokesperson Andrew Burnes explained on the company's official site (via Eurogamer).

“We are working closely with Crystal Dynamics to address and resolve all game issues as quickly as possible. Please be advised that these issues cannot be completely resolved by an Nvidia driver. The developer will need to make code changes on their end to fix the issues on GeForce GPUs as well.

“In the meantime, we would like to apologise to GeForce users that are not able to have a great experience playing Tomb Raider, as they have come to expect with all of their favourite PC games.”

According to some users of Nvidia tech, the TressFX hair is causing drops by as much as 20FPS, but turning it off doesn't seem to fix the issue.

KitGuru Says: It's interesting to see AMD getting a specific game promotion inline with Nvidia's “Way it's meant to be played,” campaign. Combine that with AMD tech being used in the next-generation consoles and it looks like the chip developer is making real strides against its GPU rival.

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2 comments

  1. Nyazzle
    March 7, 2013 at 3:16 pm

    Tress fx looks amazing! Finally hair will look awesome in games!

  2. Esko Gardner
    March 7, 2013 at 3:22 pm

    There is a fundamental problem with the lack of compute ‘availability’, what Nvidia has to do is update its drivers to unlock compute using the title. I think this is found in Civ V benchmarks, where the 600-series have comparable compute capacity as AMD, but in other benchmarks it falls behind completely.

    I think this might be the case.

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