About tesselation and resource consumption

[Jbonham_86]

Hello all

So... [redacted] my previous card was a 5870, directx 11 ready, and when I turned on tesselation the framerate dropped to hell, but hey, it was understandable.

But now I have a r9 290 overclocked, 8gb ddr3 2133mhz ram and a i5 4670, and I still get frame drops that make me turn the thing off altogether. Is this normal? any game I play, Max payne 3, metro 2033, and in benchmarks I have to turn it off or I get a [redacted] score.

Is the technology not developed yet? or do I need even a beefier pc?

Profanity isn't allowed in the technical forums.
-- stahlhart

 

[Keysplayr]

What do you mean, "score" ?
Did you buy the card to benchmark or to play games? Do the framerates drop to unplayable levels when using tesselation? Meaning below 30fps?

 

[Arkadrel]

games normally use x16 tessellation....

OpenGL(?) w/ tessellation:

DirectX w/ tessellation:

With a 290 your GPU is about as powerfull as it can get.

Is the technology not developed yet? or do I need even a beefier pc?

Tessellation is eye candy, its to make things look better, not run better.

 

[BrightCandle]

Tesselation isn't normally that big a hit, although on its most extreme settings it will bring any modern card to a halt. An amount of tesselation is a decent boost in graphical quality without much in the way of cost. But you have to remember tesselation is a fixed function bit of hardware, its not traded off against shader programs its fixed and thus you only have so much of it, and the AMD cards have a lot less than Nvidia cards. So you wont at any point be able to use the maximum setting, that is designed for the Nvidia users.

 

[KingFatty]

I still get frame drops that make me turn the thing off altogether.

Could you clarify? It sounds like every now and then your framerates get unexpectedly low but are usually high?

Or are you saying they remain low all the time?

 

[Jbonham_86]

Sorry If I didnt explain myself correctly, the framerate is low al the time, not just huge drops.

Well, I didnt know that the highest level of tesselation is for nvidia cards, that sucks, I will remember to set it at medium.

And sorry for the profanity xD

 

[Arkadrel]

Sorry If I didnt explain myself correctly, the framerate is low al the time, not just huge drops.

Well, I didnt know that the highest level of tesselation is for nvidia cards, that sucks, I will remember to set it at medium.

And sorry for the profanity xD

It depends on the game, and how they put in tessellation.

Sometimes it hurts nvidia card owners more than amd ones, to use tessellation.

Which game are you playing right now with tessellation thats giveing you issues?

 

[Gloomy]

Sorry If I didnt explain myself correctly, the framerate is low al the time, not just huge drops.

Well, I didnt know that the highest level of tesselation is for nvidia cards, that sucks, I will remember to set it at medium.

And sorry for the profanity xD

Don't set it to medium. The in game setting might not tessellate certain things at medium when compared to high. Leave it on as high as possible, then use the tessellation option in AMD's drivers to set a tessellation limit instead. That way you control the maximum amount of tessellation, and you know everything that is supposed to get tessellated, gets tessellated.

 

[Kenmitch]

It's possible your card is throttling if you have bad case airflow and your using the stock fan profile.

Didn't see any mention of temps or if your overclocking.

 

[lamedude]

Tessellation is eye candy, its to make things look better, not run better.

Wasn't that how it was originally sold before Nvidia made it an epeen waving contest? Use low poly geometry then tessellate it to make it look good. Civ5 is the only game that does that AFAIK.

 

[BrightCandle]

Technically tesselation is about using high quality models during development but when it comes to making it run on a real computer with other models using a much reduced polygon version of the model but with a tesselation map to add much of the detail back in if the card can support it. It saves memory on the model and it saves API overhead from all the polygons in the model that need animating and such and leaves it to the GPU to just add that in at a later stage. Makes things more complicated but its a cheap way to get a lot of improvement in visual quality with some fixed function hardware.

 

[Jbonham_86]

I went into the amd control center and turned the tesselation from amd optimized to the setting of the application, in this case games.

will it make any difference in performance?

 

[Gloomy]

I went into the amd control center and turned the tesselation from amd optimized to the setting of the application, in this case games.

will it make any difference in performance?

I don't think "AMD Optimized" does anything. I've tested it very recently with Tomb Raider, BF4, and Metro:LL and it doesn't seem to do anything. No change in performance, and no change in IQ either. Not sure why that setting is there if it's not doing anything.