Thief Will Officially Support AMD’s Mantle, TressFX 2.0 Announced


AMD Gaming Evolved

AMD’s Developer Summit will begin shortly, and we’ve already got some interesting news for you. A couple of days ago, Square Enix stated that it would support AMD’s Mantle, though we had no official word on Thief supporting it. Well, we just got a confirmation. During AMD’s event, Nixxes Software’s Jurjen Katsman (yeap, once again Nixxes is handling the PC version of EIDOS Montreal’s title) will speak about Thief, Mantle, 4K gaming and AMD’s TrueAudio.

As Jurjen claimed:

“In this presentation we will discuss some great AMD technologies that we are using in Thief. Most importantly, we will talk about Mantle and why it is something we have been waiting for for a long time. We are currently implementing Mantle inside of Unreal Engine 3 and will share some of our experiences. We will also cover additional AMD technologies we are supporting in Thief, like AMD TrueAudio, 4K Gaming, as well how are exploiting the power of the compute hardware in the GCN architecture. While we will primarily talk about our high-level view on these technologies and why we are excited about them, we will also share some helpful implementation tips from our programmers.”

In addition, AMD revealed that it will be presenting a new version of its TressFX tech. TressFX 2.0, a newer version of TressFX with better performance and easier integration into games. Additionally research is now being done to use TressFX for other things besides hair, like grass and fur.

“In this talk we will cover how TressFX rendering and physics works, the improvements made in TressFX 2.0, and the research which will be used in future products.”

It will be interesting to see whether developers will support TressFX 2.0 instead of PhysX. We do know that TressFX is a global solution (as it runs on both GPU camps) but will it be faster and more efficient in those physics calculations than Nvidia’s PhysX?

Last but not least, Johan Andersson will speak about Mantle. Hopefully Johan will share more images and perhaps some gameplay footages illustrating the performance difference between all current APIs and Mantle.

Enjoy and stay tuned for more!