You know graphics are starting to get good when hardware developers and game developers have time to work on hair. Rendering realistic hair has historically put GPUs under tremendous load, and actually we've often used FurMark—literally just a ball of dynamic fur—for stress-testing GPUs and testing for thermals. The obstructions to realistic, real-time hair rendering are mostly expected: In the real world, thousands of little strands of hair will react to every step and movement in the wind; hair can be greasy, wet, dry, and I'm sure if we were stylists, we'd be able to name dozens of other hair afflictions. Oh, and hair doesn't clip in the real-world, either. None of this is easy to render without consuming more system resources than can be allocated to, well, just hair.

This is why we see polygonal, blocky hair in a lot of games -- it gets covered by hoods or rendered in a bland enough way that it's not something you pay any mind. Artists can apply masks and textures that create hair that looks the part, but that's far away from the realm of hair (I'm getting semantic satiation over here) being realistically responsive to weather and movements. And this is where AMD hopes to enter the ring.

Hot on the heels of their Jaguar integration in the PS4, AMD has announced the development of its TressFX hair rendering technology. The company—in joint-effort with game dev Crystal Dynamics—hopes to bring further realism to Lara Croft's blood-spattered, dirt-covered avatar in the newest Tomb Raider iteration.

It's been exciting to follow NZXT's developments over the past few months: The company is vying heavily for an enthusiast market, and thus far, it's impressed us a few times. Today's announcement isn't a crazy Phantom case or tediously-designed PSU, though, it's a fan.

Although fans tend to be a fairly boring topic, if we're all honest with one another, this year has had some pretty exciting fan designs emerging. Antec's TrueQuiet fans intrigued us at CES with their rotational body (the entire casing rotates, not just the blades), the idea being that this eliminates turbulence between the blades and the outer-rim. SilverStone also put out their AP123 tri-blade design fans, which we discussed in a previous TechRAID episode. And now with somewhat of a more conventional fan design, NZXT's FZ-200mm case fans promise to increase airflow 15% on top of the previous NZXT 200mm model, resulting in 103CFM at 20dBA.

Gaming peripheral manufacturer Razer has announced the re-release of its custom StarCraft II gaming peripherals, now in Heart of the Swarm flair and boasting RTS-specific features and other interesting design elements. Among the company's re-launched peripherals are its Spectre mouse, Marauder keyboard, and Banshee headset, each outfitted with the StarCraft II logo in a default deep purple color, a la the HotS/Zerg origins.

Perhaps the item of most technical interest is the Marauder keyboard, which hosts what Razer calls "an APM Lighting System [that] offers a fully-integrated gaming experience that responds directly to a player's maneuvers and speed, providing vibrant performance feedback." The same feature was found on the original Marauder, launched some back in 2010, though we haven't personally tested it. The backlit keyboard features a fairly comprehensive color spectrum and manipulates the backlight color in accordance with the player's speed and actions, but is decidedly high-price considering its lack of mechanical switches (MSRP $100).

Unigine Corp. has announced its successor to the famed Heaven Benchmark GPU stress-testing utility, Valley Benchmark; as we've stated in our "how to benchmark your PC guide," Heaven has been one of the longest-standing, most effective tools for real-world (non-synthetic) graphics hardware stress tests. The utility's primary advantage is that it renders environments similar to what might be found in modern, high-end PC games -- this is unlike synthetic benchmarks, which will focus on number-crunching to put the GPU cores under maximum computational load.

Japanese publication 4Gamer.net recently interviewed AMD Product Manager of Desktop Graphics Devon Nekechuk, who made an official statement that the company would not be introducing a new line of RADEON HD graphics processors in 2013. That doesn't mean AMD fans (and fans of competition) have nothing to look forward to, though.