DirectX 11: Tessellation in Stalker: CoP, Dirt 2, Unigine and Alien vs. Predator

One of the DX11 buzzwords is Tessellation. The guys at PCGH try to show what advantages this feature may have for gamers, including comparison pics of several games and technology demos.

[iMad]

By default it's allready looks beautifull. Compare to Uncharted 2 textures.

But it can be even more better with tesselation and displacement mapping on. i could't just image it can be. And X-engine on xbox will have this level od detail because it has hardware tesselation unit build in.

Can't wait to see X-engine (Halo Reach as a first axample) in action.

[Ju]

Another buzzword. Its essentially vertex (de)compression done by the GPU. UC2 (and others) do vertex pre-processing on a large scale to make things look like they do already. Maybe comparable to tessellation, but more like vertex reduction before those hit the render pipeline (essentially having the same effect - higher polys where you need them and cut off the ones you don't need (culling and clipping)). Nice that its now build into an API and newer GPUs can do that in HW. Not new, though.

[wxer]

@iMad
oh man you are sooooo full of it
before TGS you and some other guy claims to be a developer said that MS well show us
this so called "X-engine"
and they'll show halo reach on it

what happened to that ??

[hakis86]

was visually a lot better here, the others only looked like they changed shape/position. I hope they will find better ways to draw an advantage of this or else it may not be owrth all the computing power it requires. I'll have to see some more impressive in-game examples if I'm gonna be interested in buying a DX11 card NOW... think I'll wait.

[zagibu]

I'm not sure whether it uses much processing power, because as I understand it, they have a special tesselation unit on the GPUs, which is unused when no tesselation is required, so you don't really win something by disabling it in settings.

[Kakkoii]

@hakis86:

Perhaps you need some glasses man.

Did you look at the flag? First it was a blocky mesh, then with tessellation it became more fluid looking because it was able to have more geometry without much of a performance hit. The same thing is done for the water effects in Dirt 2. And just look at the detail of the mesh in Alien vs Predator. And for Stalker, take a look at his gas mask, it's able to be a perfect circle because of tessellation and the rest of him looks more natural also, watch the jacket as it switches around. It's not that polygons are just moved around, but that more complex shapes are able to be created without much of a performance hit, no more blocky shapes in our games once tessellation is used.

[hakis86]

Glasses=p

These are a few screenshots, my point is let's see some HD video footage and a test of a system where one can enable/disable it, and then see how visible it is in-game and how it effect the performance.

[Kakkoii]

Here's the closest thing around to what you want.

http://n4g.com/News-379264....

4:16 into the video shows off why Tessellation is so awesome pretty well compared to what we used to use.

[hakis86]

Thanks for the link to the video kakkoi.

Interesting, looks like nice features. Funny that Ambient Occlusion is already supported by nVidia cards ^^ HDAO

can't wait for games and more tech-demos of DX11 though.

[dirthurts]

Is these games where ported to DX11.
Games that are built from the ground up with DX11 in mind will make much better use of it.

I do agree though, the house looks fantastic. The other two...meh.
I was hoping that Dirt2 would use the same effects for rock and trail effects. We'll see.

[Christopher]

You won't see much gain out of tessellation. It's a geometric replacement for repeating patterns that will help free up processing for other graphic elements. It won't drastically add any detail potential.

The screenshots, especially the house one, are a bit misleading. You can create the exact same texture repeating areas in DX10 and DX11, only the DX11 would use slightly less processing from your GPU. This is okay for the 360, but it still won't allow for much more beyond what is there now. For PCs, it really doesn't matter since GPUs have so much power with the latest cards that the processing power they gain for using them is already available.

[Kakkoii]

Yeah... no, cgoodno. Yes, tessellation is a tiling effect of the geometry. But DX11 cards have tessellation units built into the hardware. So they can increase the polygon count to mass amount with hardly any performance hit. By increasing the detail of the mesh this way, you can create vast landscapes that look unique and highly detailed. You can create perfectly smooth, round or rocky shapes without actually having to create a high polygon model that would take a ton of processing power to render.

Also by applying the bump map data using tessellation, it doesn't just use lighting and culling effects to make something look say rocky for example. The bump map data can be used to actually tessellate and then deform the mesh. Making it physically that shape.

Check out this mountain scene demo of Tessellation in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

And this video demonstrates the what I was talking about with bump mapping:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

This technology has a HUGE impact on the quality of our games. And is another big step closer to running realistic scenes in real-time.

[trgz]

Finally, circular wheels!

[ShiftyLookingCow]

Confirmed! Tessellation will be used extensively in Dead or Alive Xtreme 3.

[TABSF]

DX11 and Crysis 2 will looks 2 gens ahead of any other game.

it got more than 3 time the wire frame.

[Pandamobile]

Huge poly increase. Woah.

[free2game365]

"Colin McRae Dirt 2 which will be released in December uses the DirectX 11 Tessellation for the design of banners and flags. Furthermore water surfaces should be animated more realistic by using Tessellation if players drive through them."
Wow, 3 month delay for banners and flags, this is totally worth buying a video card over

[Kakkoii]

That's just on the tessellation side. It's also going to utilize the much better multi-threading of DX11 and the new Shader Model 5.0 which brings a whole slew of improvements and graphical enhancing goodies. Tessellation will also be used to make the crowds look much better, along with their animations.

http://www.pcgameshardware....