Character Artist here. Man, this thread is full of people saying all the wrong things.

Hair is still very much done with cards. We’re not to a point where groom systems (essentially having multiple hair splines that then populate areas of hair with instanced strands) are ready or performant for real-time at production level, even in the most cutting edge games. Hairworks was a neat piece of tech but didn’t give great results and tanked performance.

Even if groom systems were ready for bleeding edge game projects, we’d still be years behind for most games, especially mobile, and cards will always exist in some capacity for things like feathers, where we can have one card per feather and they don’t really need thickness.