Possibly the most surprising news for to start this year with. Rise of the Tomb Raider, the sequel to the 2012 reboot of Tomb Raider and a previously Xbox one timed exclusive, is going to be bundled with Nvidia cards.
Now, you might ask, what is so surprising in that ? Don’t Nvidia bundle big AAA games quite regularly with their cards ? Now here is the new thing. Rise of Tomb Raider is an AMD Gaming Evolved title i.e. the game will utilise AMD’s techs like Tress FX and others. Here’s an excerpt of Game Director Brian Norton talking about it:
We definitely believe the hair technology we developed with AMD was a foundation for the way we believe hair will be rendered in the future video game graphics. And, as pioneers of this – there’s not many people to look at for reference other than films – we have been pushing that technology to find ways to make it even better. And we have been developing techniques to allow us to have more hair but less physics. The hair is now in clusters, so the way hair naturally falls is that hair wants to be next to a adjacent hairs that create shapes. Now, the hair splines can follow these guide hairs and these formerly physics-grown hairs, so it feels a little bit more natural when it moves. That’s one of the evolutions, and in water we now have the “zero-gravity” effect; so, when she goes underwater, her hair will float and it’s important – when it comes out of the water – it will feel heavier and feel more clumped and obviously look wet and darker, so all these things, including snow and the snow accumulated in the hair, that we’ve been incorporating into our technology.
So, seeing a gaming evolved title getting bundled with Nvidia is quite a new thing for me at least seeing a game by a Rival company bundling up games with their cards. Rise of Tomb Raider, starting January 7th 2016 to February 23 2016 is going to be bundled with gtx 970, gtx 980 and 980ti series cards and laptops with gtx 970m or above and is releasing for PC somewhere in January.
