Nvidia's Indiana Jones upgrade could be the end of bad video game hair

This follically challenged writer can only gaze with envy at how lush and shiny Harrison Ford's locks suddenly look in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. So thick and full... so realistic. Has he been using a special shampoo since the game dropped in December?

It's turns out that the pilary glowup is all thanks to some super clever tech that's coming out just in time for the release of the new DLC next month. Forget robotic hair transplants or CRISPR-based hair growth, this is Nvidia RTX Hair.

Nvidia teased the tech a while back as part of its pipeline for RTX 50-series graphics cards. It's confirmed that an update will be with us in September just as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The Order of Giants drops, giving the roving archaeologist perhaps the most immaculate hairdo the gaming world has seen.

Here comes the science bit...

What is Nvidia RTX Hair?

Nvidia RTX Hair aims to solve a long-standing video game graphics conundrum that's given us some truly terrible gravity defying digital coiffures over the years. Developers have long struggled with the question of how to make the stuff on the top of characters' heads look not like a bird's nest or a broom while maintaining smooth performance and not eating up memory.

Nvidia's solution is to change the shapes used to model hair. Instead of using traditional sequences of triangles, RTX Hair uses Nvidia's new linear swept sphere (LSS) primitive – a thick, round 3D line with varying radii.

Multiple linear swept spheres can be chained together to build 3D curves, sharing vertices at overlaps. When multiple LSSs are chained into strands and the camera is pulled back, the sharp angles melt away and the thick lines become thin smooth curves. Nvidia says this allows rendered strands to better fit common hair shapes while keeping the demands on VRAM reasonable and enabling better lighting and shadows.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be the first game to get RTX Hair via an update to the real-time path tracing mode on Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards, which have hardware acceleration of ray tracing for hair and fur and support for the LSS primitive (see our guide to the best graphics cards).

As we see in the example imagery above, the new tech makes Harrison Ford's hair look more realistic and handsomely full.

Nvidia sees LSS as a big step toward rendering high-quality digital humans in real time. So could this be the start of a new golden age of video game hair, unlocking a host of shampoo ad-worthy dos and consigning messy straw barnets to the past?

Will we soon spend more time admiring characters' perfectly combed partings than playing the game? Or will the tech be forgotten like Nvidia HairWorks? Let me know what you think.

Launch Trailer – Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™: The Order of Giants - YouTube

Watch On

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is available for Xbox Series X|S, PS5 and for PC via Steam. Need a 50-series GPU? See the best prices below.

Bethesda presented the above trailer above for the new story chapter The Order of Giants at Gamescom Opening Night Live yesterday. The downloadable content will be released on 4 September. The publisher also announced that a port will be coming for the Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026.

For more Nvidia-related tech and game design news, see the Nvidia DLSS denoiser in Blender.