Our dear friends over at PCGamesHardware had an interesting interview with CD Projekt RED’s lead engine developer, Balázs Török, in which Balázs claimed that AMD users will be able to enjoy the new fur and hair GPU-accelerated effects, provided Nvidia lets them to.
When asked about the new hair and fur effects, Balázs said that – at this moment – these aforementioned effects run on AMD Radeon GPUs.
“At the moment it works, but if it can run at the end, the decision of Nvidia. What matters is the direction in which they continue to develop the technology and whether and what barriers they are installed. But I think it will also run on Radeon graphics cards.“
Moreover, Balázs claimed that CD Projekt RED is using a more polished version of the fur tech than the one used in Call of Duty: Ghosts. This means that the team will use a more advanced version of the fur tech which will result in better performance, and might look prettier. And as Balázs said, there would be more than one animals on screen with this new fur effect.
Balázs also talked about some other things regarding PhysX, and made a comment about AMD’s latest API, Mantle. From the looks of it, and even though Balázs believes that Mantle is a great idea, The Witcher 3 will not support it. And that’s to be expected as this game is a Nvidia-powered title. Still – and since it will stress the CPUs due to its open-world nature – it would be great to see the benefits of this new API in such a sandbox title.
The Witcher 3 is currently planned for a 2014 release on PC, Xbox One and PS4.
Kudos to our reader ‘Sid Spyker’ for informing us about this interview!
[UPDATE]
Nvidia contacted us about this article. It appears the hair and fur effects are not handled by PhysX. They are handled by DX11 via DirectCompute.
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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