City Of The Future Tessellation demo

[Scali]

Here is a tessellation demo that nVidia has shown at GTC 2010 recently:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz1Y5YkqgyQ

It should give you a good impression of what tessellation can really do, when the whole engine and geometry is designed for it (unlike many current titles, which are basically just console-ports with fake tessellation bolted on).
Note how shockingly low the detail is when the tessellation is disabled. All that detail is generated by the GPU on-the-fly, rather than being stored in memory.

 

[blastingcap]

Here is a tessellation demo that nVidia has shown at GTC 2010 recently:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz1Y5YkqgyQ

It should give you a good impression of what tessellation can really do, when the whole engine and geometry is designed for it (unlike many current titles, which are basically just console-ports with fake tessellation bolted on).
Note how shockingly low the detail is when the tessellation is disabled. All that detail is generated by the GPU on-the-fly, rather than being stored in memory.

I'm afraid that we will be mostly stuck with DX9 games with a few bolted-on DX11 effects until the next-gen consoles launch. Even Crytek is no longer PC-exclusive. And MMO/RTS (PC gaming strongholds) aren't really known for pushing the boundaries of visual effects.

 

[Illyan]

I'm more impressed by the smoke and fluid dynamics, that's pretty awesome.

 

[Arkadrel]

If all we get is consol ports, it ll be 10 years before we see any games that look anywhere close to those demos.

The ocean one though.. wow that one had me, I want water in games to look like that.
@Illyan really the smoke one? to me that was by far the worst of the 3 demos shown there, the other 2 had alot more appeal to me.

 

[thilanliyan]

I wish we weren't stuck with basically console development and then ports. I would love to see effects like this in games.

 

[Arkadrel]

If they really want to push sales of new grafics cards, and some game dev really wants to make good money in the pc only side, they cant bring consol like grafics.

They would need to step it up, which sadly they arnt. We re stuck with consol ports and it looks like its a trend, a sad one really.

 

[T2k]

Wow, NV HQ must be panicking sending out updated '"punchline" materials to their forum insiders now on hourly basis...

Personal attacks are not acceptable.

Moderator Idontcare

 

[Gloomy]

Wow, NV HQ must be panicking sending out updated '"punchline" materials to their forum insiders now on hourly basis...

You need a temp ban. You need one, so you have time off from trolling to think about why that post was a bad idea.

 

[blastingcap]

Wow, NV HQ must be panicking sending out updated '"punchline" materials to their forum insiders now on hourly basis...

Scali can be abrasive sometimes, but give it a rest with the "forum insiders" slur. These clips have been posted online for a month now; they were from GTC 2010.

 

[Gloomy]

JHH looks like a beach bum with a tan and those 3D glasses.

 

[BD231]

lol ~> " your smoke looked like sand floating in space last year ".

Looks like tessellation units will be getting some attention soon.

 

[blastingcap]

JHH looks like a beach bum with a tan and those 3D glasses.

Would you prefer pasty with nerdboy glasses?

 

[Arkadrel]

Gotta give it to nvidia, their demos and software teams are good.
I think AMD has equally good/better engineers, but nvidia do make prettier demos.

 

[Genx87]

Question. Is it possible Tesselation could allow Fusion to perform better with limited memory bandwidth?

 

[Arkadrel]

Genx87 thats probably very likely.

Thats as good a insentive as any other to work on it, AMD wont stop improveing tessellation. Im pretty sure each generation we ll see more and more from them too.

** I also expect sideport GDDR5 memory to come with the generation of APUs that come afterwards, the 2nd gen ones. So by then memory bandwidth probably wont be like now.

*** Llano is supposed to have like 30+ Gb/s memory bandwidth with DDR3-2100~ dual channel, but something about how when its on-die it can use it more effectly than a normal grafics card can. So it probably wont be too bad even with the first gen of APUs. I heard others say around 56xx card performance for the llano, now that in a notebook would be sweet

 

[T2k]

Scali can be abrasive sometimes, but give it a rest with the "forum insiders" slur. These clips have been posted online for a month now; they were from GTC 2010.

That was my point.

 

[Gloomy]

Just out of curiosity, what's tessellation looking like on Intel's side of the fence?

 

[blastingcap]

That was my point.

That wasn't my point, though. You know what? I want don't to get involved with whatever is going on b/w you and him. *excuses self from the crossfire*

Just out of curiosity, what's tessellation looking like on Intel's side of the fence?

They don't have DX11 ready in their Sandy Bridge embedded graphics but are promising to fix that soon:

http://www.techradar.com/news/compu...intel-dx11-graphics-around-the-corner--716359

 

[Arkadrel]

Gloomy you mean on a sandy bridge?

If sandy bridge is even half as fast as the 5670, i ll be surprised.
At the very least I doubt a sandy bridges grafics card will beat out a llano's.

 

[Seero]

That wasn't my point, though. You know what? I don't to get involved with whatever is going on b/w you and him. *excuses self from the crossfire*

[joke]
Nope, you are in and will be tagged for the rest of the forum life.
[/joke]
Some may be confused. There are 2 parts to the demo, one is tessellation, which is in Dx11, the other one is physics, which has nothing to do with tessellation, but physics (or PhysX to be precise). Other than PhysX, there are no other engine that are accelerated by GPU when simulating physics, so therefore, although it will run on Fusion and Sandy Bridge, it will not benefit by its embedded GPU.

 

[blastingcap]

[joke]
Nope, you are in and will be tagged for the rest of the forum life.
[/joke]
Some may be confused. There are 2 parts to the demo, one is tessellation, which is in Dx11, the other one is physics, which has nothing to do with tessellation, but physics (or PhysX to be precise). Other than PhysX, there are no other engine that are accelerated by GPU when simulating physics, so therefore, although it will run on Fusion and Sandy Bridge, it will not benefit by its embedded GPU.

Wow I'm just a typo factory today... now I am missing entire words! I meant to say I don't want to get involved.

 

[Arkadrel]

The first gen fusion chips will have kinda slow grafics.... no way a 5670 ish cpu/gpu~apu or what they call it, will be able to run a demo like that, reguardless of if it had a PhysX engine or not.

I suspect the demo shown there was run on 4x SLI 480s or something
But damn is it good looking, we need games like that... but first we all need 4x480 performance grafics cards and we need developers to make games that look like that, instead of consol ports.

 

[RussianSensation]

All NV vs. AMD fanboism aside, one can truly appreciate NV trying to promote next generation graphical features (of course AMD is welcome to do so as well). What we all want to see are better looking/more realistic physics effects and graphics in games. I like how tessellation is giving developers another way to think outside the box. We can't expect games to look much more realistic by only relying on slow evolution of higher textures and shaders. Ultimately, the only way to present realism in a game is to incorporate physics characteristics in games so that objects can react as they do in the real world.

Let's hope AMD and NV both continue to push tessellation and physics (not PhysX) in the future because these demos do look very promising.

 

[Dark_Archonis]

That was an impressive video, thanks for that link. Definitely shows what tessellation is fully capable of.

I'm afraid that we will be mostly stuck with DX9 games with a few bolted-on DX11 effects until the next-gen consoles launch. Even Crytek is no longer PC-exclusive. And MMO/RTS (PC gaming strongholds) aren't really known for pushing the boundaries of visual effects.

Crysis 2, using CryEngine 3 is expected to be extremely scalable though. Crytek already confirmed the PC version of Crysis 2 would blow away the console versions in image quality.

I expect Crysis 2 to really stress modern PC hardware, just like the original game does.

 

[Scali]

I'm afraid that we will be mostly stuck with DX9 games with a few bolted-on DX11 effects until the next-gen consoles launch.

Exactly, which is why I wanted to show a 'proper' example of tessellation.
For some games it's easier to add 'proper' tessellation than others. Games which use generated geometry anyway, such as for large terrains, like Civ5 and HAWX 2.

As you can see, you really need to design your geometry with tessellation in mind. The geometry needs to be low-detail, but with enough information to scale it up to extremely detailed close-ups using dynamic tessellation.

Even Crytek is no longer PC-exclusive.

No, but I think they won't want to go below the level of Crysis/Warhead with Crysis 2. Their engine is capable of scaling very well anyway.