NVIDIA has released a new video, showing long Hair being simulated and rendered in real-time using NVIDIA HairWorks 1.1. The High Quality version is using roughly 500k hair. This video was captured by Tarkan Sarim and was recorded on a GTX980 with Shadowpla. Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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wow. you just need a GTX 980 to renderize the hair of a single dude! it’s arkham knight all over again! 😛
You’re so far in left field you just facechecked the wall
“renderize”
yeah…that’s not the word, right? :S
just take the “ize” off and you have the proper word. 🙂
no
To hell with it, I like renderize..So what if it’s not a word, it bloody well should be…like smothercate..”The murderer used a pillow to smothercate the victim.”
I wont be impressed unless I see this being used in a game.
I, on the other hand, would only be impressed if we don’t need a high end card to run such an effect smoothly.
My honest reaction would be:
500K hair on a GTX 980…meh(exactly how I felt seeing the article’s title).
500K hair on a GTX 970…hmm, cool.
500K hair on a GTX 960 and lower…Ok, you have my attention, now.
Even a lower end version of this like 10k with 16x tessellation would work wonders for npcs in openworld games, but f’ innovation right?
Give one character 32049302932 strands of hair, put 128x tessellation on it and sell this as a “feature” with your next gpu line up.
A GTX 980 could barely do this, why would you expect the same thing to run on a 960?
I have a theory that players will almost always choose environment quality over character quality (assuming the types of games that are popular now are popular in the future*).
Would you rather have 500k strands of hair on your (third-person) character, or 500k strands of grass blowing in the wind at that character’s feet. To me it’s a no-brainer – give me flowing grass!
*who knows, maybe dating ‘simulators’ will benefit from characters that can toss their hair at you? Realistic pubic hair? Dang, now I can’t un-think that.
NVIDIA has module for grass too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2j_HNzXUUc
Yes but just bear in mind that this sort of demo would only be viewable in a 3D rendering app years ago like Maya, not running realtime on a mainstream GPU in it’s own third party viewer. I’m a bit surprised, it’s like the PC master race is getting dumb or something, we should be embracing it and this is what a GPU can do NOW.
Very neat but I think they should work on making it perform better. The performance hit is insane
https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2015/05/12/tressfx-hair-cross-platform-and-v20
strange nv started with direct compute like amd and changed it to something very inefficient.. especially for gcn.
For real, it’s cool I guess but not like 20% hit cool.
You can render a nìgger fro on an Apple IIe.
LOL
performance?
2 fps on your ancient lowe end gtx 680. 40+ fps on 1080 max settings on my gtx 970!
I played witcher 3 with evrything maxed 1080p+ hairwords and it never dropped under 30 fps. Also the hairwords perfomance hit was higher at witcher 3 release date. But later they released some patches who reduced a lot the hairworks perfomance hit. This show that it was unoptimized at first and they had to optimize it by patches. Still i played the game from start to finish without any perfomance issues with evrything maxed.
idk about W3 that was crap optimized !!
as for this hairworks technology its pretty impressive i can do easily 99k hair and looks amazing and run amazing!
Again, you’re baised, and you still haven’t shown your GTX 680 with ultra in GTA 5. You do know even a GTX 970 can’t maintain 60fps maxed out with ultra grass on? The streets yeah but once you go into the hillsides the performance drops like a stone and that’s not even using MSAA.
the gtx 970 is a beta
100+ FPS on my gtx 980 ti x2 sli OC ACX 2.0 1080p
80+ fps on my GIGABYTE GTX 970 G1 GAMING on 1080p . 60+ fps on 1440p. 40+ fps on 4k. However tomorow i might be the lucky owner of a 980 ti. EVGA sent me today a email and told me that tomorow they will announce the winners of their 980 ti competition! A millionnare and leader of the most powerful crime organization in the world like me( leader of theFoot Ninas) i will be first in their winner list!!
8 fps on my GIGABYTE GTX 970 G1 GAMING on 1080p, 6fps on 1440p, 4fps on 4k*
delete my comment but not the racist one? hahaha
your racist and a fanboy hahaha
I remember watching a documentary for a Pixar movie from just a few years ago where they talked about how difficult it was to make realistic hair in a pre-rendered CG movie. Now we’re seeing it in real-time on home PC hardware? Holy sh*t.
It’s progress, unlike the plastic, lifeless hair we have now. The Witcher 3 has Hairworks on Geralt, horses, wolves, monsters and Geralt’s hair get’s wet in the rain, water and dries over time. Ultra options like grass can take more performance and I’ve seen TW3 go below 40fps in some places on ultra without no Hairworks, so Hairworks is not the biggest frame-rate killer.
BTW, for those who don’t know, PS4/XB1 run lower than the lowest PC setting in The Witcher 3 in regards to shadow distance and NPC’s on screen, their grass rendering distance is medium, so yes the PC on ultra is vastly superior in every way, even high setting is.
Yes thank you for the insightful comments on the PS4/XB1 version of the game. No one asked you but you were kind enough to babble about them anyways. This is a PC site, lets focus on that shall we?
i heard Hairworx uses like 64x or 128x tessellation
it could use 16x or 32x and look virtually exactly the same, but run much more efficiently
but Nvidia don’t wanna do that
Oh joy. Now that Havok is replacing physx in all the upcoming games, including Nvidia’s partner Ubisoft. I am supposed to get excited by this?
Does Nvidia want us to have a GTX 980 as a “hairworks” card? Go home Nvidia you are drunk. People are better off using a AMD card with 16x tessellation on Witcher 3 with the monsters only mod (because your Geralt hair looks horrid).
Here is a thought Nvidia. How about you spend some money on the games you sponsor making sure the games you sponsor are not garbage, and not false advertising those games, like the Batman Gameworks game you made, which includes sped up footage, rain effects on Batman’s cape. How about getting the PC version higher textures than a 1.3 TFLOP GPU in the XB1, so our version of the game actually looks better.
NM you do not care about the actual gamers at all. Good luck finding a sucker dev to ever use this junk *cough* paying them.
“Oh joy. Now that Havok is replacing physx in all the upcoming games, including Nvidia’s partner Ubisoft. I am supposed to get excited by this?”
Those games were never going to use PhysX in the 1st place. You are confusing hardware accel PhysX with software PhysX anyways. Besides Ubisoft can’t even use smoke right. But you seem to forget Metro 2033/Last light used it very well.
Just so we can clear up a thing or two.. Nvidia didn’t make the Batman game, and they also had nothing to do with the rain effects or texture resolution issues either, that was all Warner Bros putting zero effort into the PC version (people in the know have stated the Batman PC version is unchanged since a yr ago!). Another thing, hair rendering is a b*tch no matter who does it. At least it seems they are trying to improve things.
lol don’t know where you heard all that crap about Ubi and Nvidia. They’ve used both Havok AND Gameworks for a while now. Blinkers off people!
hair simulator. it’s happening
only ONE gtx980 ? that’s it ? lol, for some hairs on a texture less model without animation and nothing more on the screen.
“some hairs”?
Since you’re not impressed at all, where can i see this demo reproduced on lower end hardware and with better performance?
Surely you must know where i can find it, right?
This was just an artists’ showcase.
you didn’t get it, a f’ing 980 only for hairs, it’s a tech demo and it’s useless it doesn’t matter if anyone can make better hairs or not cuz nobody can run this s**t if it’s going to be in any games, only 40k hairs on riley in cod eats half of your fps, same with witcher, imagine 10x. by the way it has nothing to do with art, it is purely technical
10% loss in Witcher 3 is not eating your fps.
Yep, considering how many things have hair in that game, no other game comes close. I just don’t know why people are complaining, it’s not like we PC gamers don’t have an option to turn such features off, yes I’d moan if you couldn’t like consoles, but we have options so the moaning is pointless.
Speaking of frame-rate loss, ultra grass in TW3 and GA 5 can really hit performance just as much than hairworks, ultra grass in GTA 5 kills my frame-rate even on a GTX 970. 20% performance drop with Hairworks at 60fps only equals 12fps loss which is less than foliage on ultra.
I just can’t use FXAA in GTA 5, it’s horrible, I use 2xMSAA but the performance drop in foliage is just too high on ultra settings. I’ve seen drops into 30s with ultra grass and all ultra settings maxed out.
Yep, especially on a 144hz monitor, over 60fps feels far better.
ultra grass on gtav sometimes lock my fps to 30, but hairworks on witcher 3 is nowhere near 12fps loss, with everything on ultra my min fps is around ~45 without hairworks, grass on high and geralt hair on = the same, but if i turn on full hairworks on witcher 3 it drops below 30fps when fighting some monsters etc… it’s not 10% it’s not 12fps but more than 30fps time to time
Well yeah because there are more animals or monsters with hair on them, I find the deeper forests take more FPS than with Hairworks off. 7 wolves with Hairworks on in deep forest get me slightly under 40fps. More hair on screen more performance loss, it is an ultra feature remember. The hair seems to be optimised well,. notice it doesn’t render as much hair at certain angles? Try moving around a dead wolf, you’ll see the hair not render behind the wolf or animal.
wanna play with hairworks enabled for geralt only and max foliage with no fps loss ? make his hair short 😀 there is one short hair model for him, it’s the best option i guess, game runs 52 to 60fps all the time with that model
it’s not 10% not even if you only turn on only geralt’s hairs and this demo have at least 10x more hairs
It sure looks nice but hair seems like an odd thing to prioritize on. I never played a game and thought to myself “I wish this hair looked better, the game would be more fun if it did”.
Instead it always was: “I wish this door would open”, “I wish that box, table, object moved when hit” and “I wish I could mutilate this corpse”.
They should work on that kind of sh*t. If Mortal Kombat X can model characters insides, why can’t other games?
What difference between current hairoworks that saw in games like Witcher 3 and far cry and this? Glad to see that it has not higher requiremtns than the old version. My gtx 970 g1 gaming is ready. The next game that will use Hairworks is MGS 5. Cant wait to see it there !!
Because pcs at that timde didnt have the power needed for this. Now we can!
This is going to be used in Metal Gear Phantom Pain.
LOL again marketing a certain price point card. It would have been amazing if they showcased this using a 750Ti.
Best put by @fasterthanftl:disqus
Seriously, we keep seeing all this fantastic technology with impressive features, however, we have yet to see anything this impressive rendered in-game, and within the constraints of realistic hardware.
It really is important that not only they actually start to get these to work, but also make them feasible enough for the hardware majority of people have.
Also for some reason, this looks like hay flinging around… 😛
It’s just a tech demo and like every tech demo the tech doesn’t get into games for years though TW3 has the most impressive hair on multiple things to date, no one else is really pushing forward and we haven’t seen anything from TressFX in games for 2 years. It’s just a supported toolkit in the end that comes with Hairworks.
It’s really sad to see so much negativity about Gameworks when everyone else is just following the boring path of graphics tech, sorry but fur shaders are crap, Hairworks is far superior.
I’d be interested to see an in-depth comparison between HairWorks 1.1 and TressFx 3.0.
Hmm, better than new Hitman nVidia BaldWorks™ tech 😉
stfu
gfys
HAL 9000? more like hitler 9000
People make me laugh. This was the world of high end pre-rendering machines not so many years ago. Now, we’re getting it in realtime, on a graphics card you can go out and buy and it’s not impressive! I know this would never run in a game like this now, but the mere fact it can do this is beyond impressive and a sign of what we can expect, in games in the near future.
Instead, I’m going to sit here with my arms folded saying “nope, not impressed, show me something else” because I have NO CLUE about what is actually going on here. Dolts.
Exactly my thoughts. Well said.
Simulations are neat and certainly impressive, but they’re often showcasing what could be possible in a game way in the future, so it’s difficult to get excited about them. I remember Nvidia demos like 10 years ago where the character had a full head of hair and we’re just now starting to see it in a select few games.
I think it’s about time for another shot at the discreet physics processor that is optimized to calculate only physics simulations – CPU’s and GPU’s are pushed to the max as they are – we need more supplemental silicon.
Virtual reality would benefit from physics immensely. Imagine sitting in a VR boat and you lean over the side and put your hand in the water and splash it around – the feeling of immersion would be incredible, or even just splashing in virtual rain puddles, or virtual fishing with realistic water simulation. The demands of VR, at some point, will greatly outweigh the modern PC.
HAHA IN ENGINE GAME WOULD BE LIKE BAM AFTER LAUNCH DOWNGRADE
and not a single f’ was given
Yeah, just one GTX 980 needed for a single head full of hair. Nvidia Gameworks, die already!
Please show me another piece of middleware capable of reproducing this with better performance.
This is just a showcase to show how good it can get, no game would use this many hairs.
Witcher 3 uses 200k hairs supposedly, and that’s only when you’re upclose, it has dynamic LOD.
any source about that 200k hairs ? all i saw is a tech demo from two to three years ago which they showcased hairworks on monsters with near 50k hairs before downgrade and stuff
Who’s prioritizing what? What the f*ck are you talking about?
What does Nvidia have to do with games having bad interactivity and static objects?
They have and have had the tech to do that, go complain to game developers.
Good grief.
Hairworks has dynamic LOD, Geralt has only 200k (according to over 1 year old info) hairs on the closest LOD compared to 500K in this demo, as the camera distances from him the number of hair strands drops and performance improves without having any real visual impact since he’s too far from the camera anyway to notice all of those extra hairs.
The biggest performance impact is only during close-up cutscenes.
It’s really about what one GPU can do, of course it will be simplified for games but in years to come with newer GPUs and DX12 we’ll see more objects with proper hair on them.
Another thing from Nvidia that will kill pc gaming, look at Batman arkham knight with and without nvidia gameworks…
How exactly is Gameworks killing PC gaming? People please stop this AMD fanboy crap. 🙂
I’m not a fanboy crap as you said, my graphic cards were always made by Nvidia for the simple reason i love Physx and if Amd has its Physx that will be another story,
For my comment concerning gameworks if you have a little intelligence to read the article about Batman Arkham Knight you’ll have understood what i mean but it’s clear that when God gave people brains he forgot you,
I’m sorry but I’m the one who is thinking right now. Can you tell me which problems in Batman Arkham Knight is caused by Gameworks and how it ruins the game? Do you believe that without Gameworks, new Batman would be without issues? If you claim something, speak about concrete problems and issues, not in general. Batman Arkham Knight is the example of really bad PC Port which has issues and bugs with Gameworks off or on (it doesn’t matter).
Take a look here and especially at the conclusion of this article :
http://www.techspot.com/review/1022-batman-arkham-knight-benchmarks/page8.html
There should be middle ground between this and traditional hair, the performance impact is still too strong and the hair looks like it’s in water, at least in TW3.
Come on, open world game like The Witcher 3 with Hairworks on, shadows and foliage visibility set to high everyone else on ultra and still can hit 60fps. I really don’t know why people are moaning, I mean the hair even gets properly wet for goodness sake. I rather have this than 2000 NPCs with low quality LOD, LOL.
http://i.imgur.com/ubdb72u.jpg
Well you can chop bodies to bits in Shadow Warrior, killing Floor 2 also goes a lot further with with NVIDIA Flex physics.
It’s NVIDIA’s tessellation, NVIDIA’s GPUs are faster at higher tessellation levels. TressFX slows down near to the hair just as much as Hairworks does. Remember, TressFX had a 23% performance hit just on Lara’s hair alone.
i was just reading how the fiji gpu’s are better geared for gaming because of gcn’s 1.2 optimizations for geometry and tessellation while holding good multi purpose compute ability with double precision but not near that of hawaii
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review/2
Exactly. I think NVIDIA should give us a possibility to change tesselation factor for Hairworks to tweak this tech.
imagine Paz from Metal Gear Solid with that quality of hair
I would literally c*m on my screen
Sure. Like we believe this will work. Thanks.
I think nobody expect that Gameworks features would be performance free. According to review from techspot, they should tweak it for better performance but Gameworks is not responding for problems appearing when they are turned off. People reported massive stuttering event on low settings without Gameworks features and that’s the main problem. Gameworks could be turend off, but bad PC port didn’t save anything. And I personally don’t like statements like this:
“it seems any game Nvidia touches at the moment ends up running like garbage”
Maybe authors in techreport have acces to NVIDIA source code in these games. As I saw, in these game there were many issues which were not be connected with Gameworks and still there are people who connecting Gameworks with anything. I want to see exactly named problems which appear only when GW features are turned on. But this information we never get. We only got statements like this one written above.
FYI, my GTX 780 renders 200k hairs at ~60fps, with GPU usage at just ~45%,
tested with HairWorks Viewer 1.1 on Manjaladon (beast) model, up-close, looks superb and its already more hairs than you actually need in a game.
500k for single head upclose is both overkill AND easy to process on GTX 980.