Nvidia has announced that its RTX Hair feature will be added to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on September 4. In a nutshell, RTX Hair uses Disjoint Orthogonal Triangle Strips (DOTS) to improve lighting and shadows in video game hair, which Nvidia says is a solution that doesn’t require a lot of extra memory as opposed to using triangles to render hair for every frame.
By using linear swept spheres, hair will look more realistic because the geometry is naturally round, thus making it easier to avoid self-intersection when casting shadow and reflection rays. This will allow Harrison Ford’s digital doppelganger in the Indiana Jones game to sport a fuller head of hair when the update to the real-time path tracing mode arrives next month. The feature will be available to RTX-50 series GPUs, and earlier this year, Nvidia added that this is a “big step toward rendering high-quality digital humans” in real time.
Hair and related elements like fur have been one of the more challenging things to accurately render in video games over the years. Fortunately, great strides have been made over the years as video game characters went from having what looked like static blobs of meat for hairdos–or buzz-cuts for many protagonists throughout the 2000s and early 2010s–to longer hair that moved realistically during gameplay.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launched last year for PC and Xbox Series X|S–and in April 2025 for PS5–and September will see the arrival of its expansion, The Order of Giants. The DLC will see Dr. Jones embark on an expedition to uncover the secrets of the Nephilim Order.
