NVIDIA Hairworks 1.1 — more hair, less performance hit

NVIDIA Hairworks, or the AMD equivalent, TressFX, has been put to use in some of the newest titles. They basically make hair look more like hair, soft, healthy individual strands of hair and not a chunk of hair. But very few people get to actually experience those effects as they bring even flagship cards to their knees.

As you can see in the graphs a huge hit is taken in terms of performance to render all those pretty hair in Witcher 3. But now with NVIDIA Hairworks 1.1, a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 is capable of rendering around 500,000 hair strands. Enjoy the following video by Tarkan Sarim captured using ShadowPlay showing off the new capability.

SOURCE: eTeknix

Pokdepinion: I guess this shows the need for optimization. If they can get a 980 to push out 500k hair strands, maybe they can get my lowly GTX860M to push out 10-20k hair strands? The prettier hair doesn’t justify the hit in performance experienced currently and this is very much needed to allow more people to actually enjoy the pretty hair that Hairworks can bring to the game.