Nvidia says a groundbreaking development in AI-rendered human imagery, specifically targeting hair, has been made possible through its latest GPUs — the GeForce RTX 50 Series announced at CES 2025.
These GPUs introduced the hardware ray tracing of the linear swept sphere (LSS) primitive, which is expected to make rendering significantly more realistic and efficient.
Handling hair in AI-generated images has notoriously been as tricky as tackling human hands, often yielding awkward results.
Nvidia’s new LSS primitive aims to resolve these issues by providing a geometrical representation that mirrors natural hair more closely by relying on spheres instead of triangles to get a more accurate fit for hair shapes.
“Rendering animated hair on humans is about 2x faster with LSS compared to previously used methods, such as Disjoint Orthogonal Triangle Strips (DOTS), while also requiring about 5x less VRAM,” Nvidia said in a statement.
The primary breakthrough with LSS is that it simplifies the rendering process by chaining together thick, round 3D lines with varying radii, allowing for smoother, more natural curves.
Unlike the earlier methods, which required a hefty amount of manual tuning and processing power to animate textures, LSS handles hair and other strand-type geometries with grace and less computational demand, according to the chipmaker.
Nvidia first introduced hardware support for ray tracing triangle meshes back in 2018, but hair and fur remained a challenge due to their complexity in light reflection and shadow casting.
Now, with LSS, the bottlenecks associated with rendering natural-looking strands at scale have been significantly reduced.
This is beneficial for both realistic human avatars in games and generally AI-generated images.
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