EA shows off Frostbite engine's next-gen hair
A cut above.
A day on from our first look at Spider-Man running on a PlayStation 5-like setup, EA has debuted some next-gen tech of its own. It's all about hair.
EA has devoted a small team of people at its DICE and Criterion studios to improving the look of follicles in the Frostbite engine. Genuinely, the results are impressive.
It's not just the physics side of how hair moves, either - it's how each hair reflects the light differently as it does so, and how this is affected when hair has been artificially coloured.
The first in a series of EA blog posts on the subject has shown off a number of sneak peeks, which Digital Foundry has rounded up below:
And yes, that mannequin is extremely creepy.
Of course, there's no guarantee this level of fidelity will be possible yet on a specific next-gen console: we simply do not know the specs of either Microsoft or Sony's machines. But as a work-in-progress for what Frostbite is capable of, it's certainly something to aim for.
Frostbite has been having a bit of a rough time of it of late - it's been repeatedly labelled a bottleneck by Mass Effect and Anthem studio BioWare, for example, which has struggled to build its role-playing games in an engine originally built for first-person shooters.
EA now uses Frostbite across the board: for racing games (Need for Speed), RPGs (Dragon Age, Mass Effect), and sports titles (FIFA). The only notable exceptions of late are projects from Respawn (Apex Legends, the upcoming Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order).