Unigine Heaven Benchmark with DX11 Tessellation

HardOCP: "We don't typically cover 3D benchmark programs, primarily since they generally have nothing to do with real-world gaming experiences. This new application from Unigine is a bit different than others though. Unigine is a 3D framework middleware engine that has been used in published games, and will also be used in some upcoming games currently under NDA. The Heaven Benchmark is the first 3D application that is available to us that utilizes DX11 and Tessellation, which will give us a glimpse of what Tessellation could do for us in games."

[MetalGearRising]

xbox360 gpu has DX11 Tessellation which Halo Reach will be the first to show case the graphical superiority and leave other consoles in the dust.

[Pandamobile]

Lol, you really are an idiot.

The 360 GPU was made before DirectX 10, let alone 11. And every ATI GPU since 2005 has had this feature, but not one game really uses it because it slows the framerate down to a crawl.

[Kakkoii]

The hardware tessellation on ATI GPU series 2000 and up, including the Xbox 360 one, doesn't have as many features as the one implemented by DirectX 11. Not to mention it has to be hard coded into your engine, as it's not part of DirectX 9 or 10.

And it's already been used on Mass Effect on the Xbox 360, MetalGearRising. Most developers haven't used it on the Xbox though because it would take a considerable amount of coding to put in their engine and work on the 360. With DirectX 11 it makes the whole job a lot easier, and more feature rich.

[Pandamobile]

The guy's a complete retard. I dunno why we're bothering trying to explain it to him.

[kaveti6616]

Tessellation was used in Mass Effect? No wonder the framerates were so terrible. The 360 GPU is not some god GPU, mmmkay MGSR?

And these screenshots, while demonstrating the improvement that tessellation can make in the geometry, don't do it enough justice. I'm sure better developers can take more advantage of DX11.

[vegnadragon]

1.2. No they haven't used Tessellation in console. If you don't know, Tessellation rises the number of polygons in the screen by a freaking lot and guess what more polygons waste? yes more memory. So now your 512mb of ram from the 360 or 256mb from ps3 are gone to render one object. So no it hasn't been used in consoles. In the computer in the other hand, i say it is possible if you have the right hardware. Now to be technical you can make a low poly model and use Tessellation, like for mountains maps for example.

[Kakkoii]

@vegnadragon:

Tessellation was used in Mass Effect on the 360. Go look it up for yourself and see.

The way tessellation works, it doesn't fill the memory like a normal model of such a high polygon count would. Your memory still loads a basic model, but then applies a tessellation algorithm to the mesh increasing polygon count and uses a displacement map to displace the newly created vertex points.

[Xi]

viva pinata is another game.

But they use it in tandem with the memexport function.

For instance, one example of its operation could be to tessellate an object as well as to skin it by applying a shader to a vertex buffer, writing the results to memory as another vertex buffer, then using that buffer run a tessellation render, then run another vertex shader on that for skinning. MEMEXPORT could potentially be used to provide input to the tessellation unit itself by running a shader that calculates the tessellation factor by transforming the edges to screen space and then calculates the tessellation factor on each of the edges dependent on its screen space and feeds those results into the tessellation unit, resulting in a dynamic, screen space based tessellation routine.

however tessellation of actual surfaces haven't really happened yet.

Expect a lot of changes in part to the 'exengine' and the release of DX11, more developers will start to take advantage of the memexport and hardware tessellation, at least to the degree it's capable of.

[evrfighter]

The discussion going on in the open zone is more in depth and civil than about 95% of the articles submitted here.

I wanted to add some input but then realized there's no longer anything that needs to be said.

OH WAIT

OP is an idiot.

[FailureRate54]

The only one with tesselletion is our Mum.

Stop write bullshit, tesselletion is built in ATI chip from 2000Series stupid idiot, your XFlop GPU can't even render a DX 7 application...ù

edit:

Yeah Yeah, only ignorant can disagree.

But here... THE FACT

We are really looking forward to real time hardware Tessellation and what it will bring. In fact many of us have been looking forward to it actually working since 2002. Tessellation is nothing new, the idea is quite old in the computer world, but the ability to run it in real-time on consumer hardware is what is new, and right now AMD has the only hardware capable of doing it.

[OpenGL]

I've run this tech demo with my 5870 and enabling tessellation in DirectX 11 literally cuts your frame rate in half. Sure it looks pretty good, but there are scenes where my frame rate drops as low as 15fps, which is pretty bad on considering this is the 5870 we're talking about.

[Kakkoii]

Well they are using a pretty heavy amount of tessellation in this demo. And since they are trying to show off the detail of tessellation, they don't have it setup to dynamically scale back tessellation based on a persons hardware. Game designers will have to take performance into account. That's the difference between a benchmark and a game.

[Xi]

You also have to remember that tessellation in the video is to an extreme, and the height maps are also a bit extreme. In most cases it'd be scaled back and the optimization would be better.

For example things like the stairs are flat planes but tessellated to look like steps, in reality it'd be easier just to make them primitives. Same with the flat tile blocks being tessellated, they don't really need to be tessellated to the extreme they are.

Also consider the drivers for the card are relatively new, and there are still a lot of performance to be made from them, and the engine itself isn't completely optimized for dx11, nor is DX11 running perfectly yet.

[OpenGL]

I understand this is a benchmark, but their goal was to show off the benefits of tessellation. Yeah, sure the environment geometry was pretty great, but it's not that damn impressive considering the awful performance I get with the Radeon 5870. Maybe when the 6870 comes out this will actually run well with tessellation enabled, but after the years of hype behind hardware tessellation, this demo was a bit disappointing. I'm sure driver updates, engine updates, and DirectX 11 updates will increase performance, but we'll have to see some massive performance gains to make this run smoothly.

[Xi]

Smart developers will find ways to use tessellation to create much better looking effects, where as in the demo it effects what, 4-5 things/textures; stone walls/bricks, roofs, the dragon, and ropes? none of which are dynamic.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

this case is a bit less extreme, but the use of tessellation on the water and flag to create more dynamic cloth and physics simulation is a better example of how developers can take better advantage. Add in tessellation for things such as terrain and building (bent metal) deformation and bullet-holes etc and you begin to see a a lot more visual impact.

Someone like Crytek will do a much better job of implementing tessellation and taking advantage of things like the compute shaders then a less motivated team.

The other nice thing is that you can tessellate objects to keep drastic silhouette, like a mountain landscape, the ridges can remain higher poly counts while the insides can become lower, heavily increasing the visual quality while remaining heavily optimized.

[Vip3r]

I guess when the 2nd or 3rd generation DX11 cards are out we won't be seeing much tessellation in games which is a mixed blessing because most cards would struggle with a lot of it in game.

Like in this video at 0:54.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

[Kakkoii]

Why would you think we won't be seeing much of it when the 2nd and 3rd gen DX11 cards come out?

[Xi]

Specially now that DX11 has compute shaders and allows things such as depth of field to occur in realtime to a much higher degree, hence the effect on the heaven benchmark.

[Vip3r]

If DX10 was anything to go by, it'll be a while yet before proper DX11 games are out and by then the 2nd or 3rd gen cards will be out too.

[FantasyStar]

Wow, is it snowing?

[Cyb3r]

Old news

[Kakkoii]

If you took the time to read, this isn't news about the benchmark being released. This is an article comparing performance of different cards running the benchmark.

[dirthurts]

Think this is very very impressive.
Benchmarks always push the envelope.
Games when optimized for the hardware will run better, and look better. I'm excited.

[xg-ei8ht]

Na, wasn't impressed at all.