Crysis 2 Tessellation Article

[96Firebird]

I see the proof that Nvidia had anything to do with Crytek's questionable tessellation use is still absent from this thread...

Interesting. :hmm:

 

[amenx]

Has anyone, especially the site that wrote the article, ever asked Crytek or Nvidia for an explanation?

 

[Keysplayr]

"Not sure how you define handle, but due to gross usage of tessellation, even NV cards tank in performance."

It's only called gross usage of tessellation because Nvidia seems to do it better. Am I correct? Or is this claim totally unfounded on my part?

"I dunno how you think ~42 fps at 1080p with a top gpu like a gtx580 is "handling" it, when performance tanks to a slideshow in some scenes (prolly intensive fighting above the nonexistant ocean). Quote: "The superiority of the GeForce GTX 590 may be due not only to its more advanced tessellation unit but also to the close partnership between EA and Nvidia."

I dunno how you think I think that. Especially when I didn't. There are games completely without tessellation that have the same cruelness toward even the highest end GPUs. That your example has tessellation is kind of irrelevant to this discussion. 42fps for a 580. Sounds like a number to me. What are you comparing it to precisely? Is that a playable framerate for this particular game?

"Also, note the 6990 gets 55 fps, the 590 gets 70, yet both have the same min. Not a very good job on NV trying to optimize against the competitor."

What numbers would you like them to be? I don't get your argument here.

"Now, if they had not included all the non required tessellation, it would be faster for AMD, but also faster for NV, and perhaps NV owners of the gtx580 can even get ~60fps at 1080p. Is that too much to ask?"

Did you see that it was mentioned that even the original Crysis had unrendered water level across entire maps? Maybe this is just a side effect of tessellation added to Crysis 2. If this is the case, then choosing a conspiracy theory path so quickly in the future, may not be the best option.
IMHO.

 

[thilanliyan]

Useless tesselation? If you have been paying attention, Thilan, it is being argued that even tesselation of a concrete K-rail is useless. What's next? Pretty soon Tesselation will be "altogether" a useless feature.
Come on man. Ask the dev before accusing me of justifying useless anything.

My "useless" comment was referring to the ocean. The other VISIBLE parts, well, it's somewhat better than nothing I suppose. I want to see tess used more and more, but only if it improves IQ and doesn't tank performance (ie. some performance loss is probably inevitable in its current state).

To be fair, you can just turn it off, can't you? Your problem would be solved.

The only part I would want to turn off would be that ocean. I agree with you and others here, the dev needs to answer some of these questions.

 

[Keysplayr]

My "useless" comment was referring to the ocean. The other VISIBLE parts, well, it's somewhat better than nothing I suppose. I want to see tess used more and more, but only if it improves IQ and doesn't tank performance (ie. some performance loss is probably inevitable in its current state).



The only part I would want to turn off would be that ocean. I agree with you and others here, the dev needs to answer some of these questions.

Arguing over the tesselated ocean is just a placeholder for another argument. The concrete K-rails would be dominating this discussion otherwise. If not the K-rail, then something else. A plant with incredible amounts of tessellation perhaps. Tanking performance on AMD cards, intentionally of course. Gets old after a while.

 

[thilanliyan]

Arguing over the tesselated ocean is just a placeholder for another argument. The concrete K-rails would be dominating this discussion otherwise. If not the K-rail, then something else. A plant with incredible amounts of tessellation perhaps. Tanking performance on AMD cards, intentionally of course. Gets old after a while.

You may be right in regards to some people but the complaint about the invisible ocean being tessellated is a valid one IMO. The other objects, well, it's debatable.

 

[Keysplayr]

You may be right in regards to some people but the complaint about the invisible ocean being tessellated is a valid one IMO. The other objects, well, it's debatable.

I'd have to agree. If we can't see it, no need for it to take up resources and have tessellation applied.

 

[Silverforce11]

I'd have to agree. If we can't see it, no need for it to take up resources and have tessellation applied.

I have to take it 1 step further, if you can't see it, dont waste resources doing it. If you do it, make sure there's a difference. Not putting it on flat surfaces where there will be no visual difference, etc.

But at least we can agree on some things.

My points above are valid, if crysis 2 did not have these useless tessellation added to rendering scenes, it would perform better for everyone, including NV.

I can say undeniably if i did own a gtx580 i would be annoyed at the wasted rendering which gives me no visual improvements but tanks performance. I would be equally annoyed if AMD Evolve ever go down this road.

 

[krumme]

We are tons of mobile users having 520, 525, 540, 550, 555 out here, and ATI cards in the same league. Not in this news group i know. We happen to exist in numbers unlike you dying breed of desktop gfx nerds !

And as the owner of a 555m, i simply hate when NV or Ati do this sorts of trick. For the simple reason: I need the f.....g power of my card for a tolerable experience, not wasted on overtessalated dragons, unseen lakes whatever.

Its a pain for the consumers. Period. And there is obvious different interests between the consumer side, and the gfx manufactures trying to outmanuver the other.

Instead of making the the usual boring ATI NV fight, lets fight for our rights.

 

[WMD]

I am not sure why this is still being debated. It is obvious that tessellating flat surfaces in to millions of triangles and ending still being flat is doing nothing but wasting resource. And it isn't a case of rush job or incompetence. This is clearly intentional to cripple hardware performance.

There is an even larger disparity in performance between AMD and Nvidia in Dragon Age 2, an AMD title where Nvidia hardware performs really badly. There is no obvious evidence that AMD has any part to do with it. But the bad performance only happens when DX11 features that AMD "helped" implement are turned on. But what is even better about Dragon age 2 and AMD gaming evolve is they add stuff like tessellation, AF, ambient occlusion and soft shadows that are only available when DX11 mode is used. But most these features (except tessellation) are already present in DX9 Crysis 2 and many other older games. Not to mention the game end up still looking quite dated despite the awful performance. This a very different scenario from Crysis 2 but one that nonetheless hurts consumer on both camps.

We may be a fan of a company products but it is important to know corporations exist to make profit and dishonest and unfair practice are extremely common in a profit only society. As a consumer, we can better benefit by exposing these dishonest business practices that hurt our gaming experience rather than blindly defending them.

 

[SirPauly]

I'm all for exposing dishonesty but don't see it in Dragon Age 2 or Crysis 2. What I do see is companies trying to do more for their customers. I'm glad to see DirectX 11 abilities in Dragon Age 2 and Crysis 2 and so much good with both.

 

[Silverforce11]

DA2 was a case of NV caught without optimized drivers at the game's release. A month later they updated the driver and now NV cards perform equally well vs AMD. There's no foul play there.

 

[Keysplayr]

DA2 was a case of NV caught without optimized drivers at the game's release. A month later they updated the driver and now NV cards perform equally well vs AMD. There's no foul play there.

Is DA2 a Gaming evolved title?

 

[WMD]

DA2 was a case of NV caught without optimized drivers at the game's release. A month later they updated the driver and now NV cards perform equally well vs AMD. There's no foul play there.

Nobody accused AMD of foul play. What's up with drivers having to optimize for games that are not yet released? The game was released as intended and besides bad performance there are huge missing textures everywhere. Didn't they test the game on Nvidia hardware? Why only this AMD title having such unacceptable quality issue with Nvidia. Lot of Nvidia forum users think something is fishy as well. Nobody have concrete evidence of foul play in either C2 or DA2.
Its the end result that matters and AMD GE did an equally bad job at DA2 as TWIMTBP at Crysis 2.

 

[Silverforce11]

Except NV updated their drivers and the game ran flawlessly. But with Crysis 2 and all the crap tessellation, there's no driver update to fix it.

Also, if you had followed DA2's launch, the game was released with NV acknowledging issues and preparing driver updates to fix it. You can read all about it in the huge DA2 thread. No point beating a dead horse: DA2 performing like crap for a few weeks was NV's fault.

 

[AtenRa]

We are tons of mobile users having 520, 525, 540, 550, 555 out here, and ATI cards in the same league. Not in this news group i know. We happen to exist in numbers unlike you dying breed of desktop gfx nerds !

And as the owner of a 555m, i simply hate when NV or Ati do this sorts of trick. For the simple reason: I need the f.....g power of my card for a tolerable experience, not wasted on overtessalated dragons, unseen lakes whatever.

You have a mobile system and you want to have the same performance as high end desktop graphics cards in Tessellation??

I will suggest you to lower the IQ (you do know you can do that??) or get a desktop PC for gaming

 

[Red Hawk]

Is DA2 a Gaming evolved title?

Kind of. The box wasn't stamped with "Gaming Evolved" and it didn't flash in your face as the game started, but for a while Dragon Age II pictures were all over AMD's graphics webpage and the promotional slides in Catalyst Control Center. I assume there was help from AMD on the development side. Enough to make it not a technical train wreck on AMD hardware, not enough to save it from various bugs, glitches, and other flaws...

IMO it was BioWare's fault that the game's performance on Nvidia hardware was terrible.

 

[WMD]

Except NV updated their drivers and the game ran flawlessly. But with Crysis 2 and all the crap tessellation, there's no driver update to fix it.

Also, if you had followed DA2's launch, the game was released with NV acknowledging issues and preparing driver updates to fix it. You can read all about it in the huge DA2 thread. No point beating a dead horse: DA2 performing like crap for a few weeks was NV's fault.

Games are supposed to render according to standard set of DirectX functions. If something is wrong, they could have sorted out the issue with Nvidia before the game was released. How many other modern game ships without half of the ground textures missing. Users should not have to wait a month for these issues to be fixed. We wont know for sure who's fault it was but such glaring quality issues and simply tacked on gimmick DX11 effects reflects badly on AMD GE just as much as the poor tessellation in Crysis2.

 

[Red Hawk]

...no, it really doesn't. Poor DirectX 11 performance is just one symptom of Dragon Age II's biggest problem: it was rushed. Glitches and bugs abound everywhere, not just with regards to performance. And even on AMD hardware there are inexplicable drops in performance. Without AMD's assistance DirectX 11 performance would have absolutely sucked on both brands of hardware. AMD ensured that their hardware would at least be playable -- they didn't cover for Nvidia, because BioWare should have done that. BioWare didn't. Nevermind the fact that whatever help AMD gave BioWare, it wasn't to the point that they got to stamp "Gaming Evolved" on the box.

It's an entirely different scenario than Nvidia directly encouraging and assisting Crytek into putting DirectX 11 into Crysis after the game was finished (no rushing) and leaving in pointless tessellation, which goes along conveniently with Nvidia cards having better tessellation performance than AMD cards.

 

[96Firebird]

It's an entirely different scenario than Nvidia directly encouraging and assisting Crytek into putting DirectX 11 into Crysis after the game was finished (no rushing) and leaving in pointless tessellation, which goes along conveniently with Nvidia cards having better tessellation performance than AMD cards.

There was no rushing of the DX11 patch? Really?

Crysis 2 didn't ship with the DX11 features. When PC gamers got wind of this, all hell broke loose. Crytek had to rush a patch to save face.

I LOVE how poor performance in DA2 is Nvidia's fault, poor performance in Crysis 2 is Nvidia's fault, the bad economy is Nvidia's fault, the flooding in the northeast is Nvidia's fault...

 

[WMD]

Of course when things go wrong in DA2 it is always Bioware and Nvidia's fault. AMD can never be blamed. After all they helped add in awesome DX11 effects. DX11 anistropic filtering anyone? Never done before in previous APIs.

 

[Genx87]

Except NV updated their drivers and the game ran flawlessly. But with Crysis 2 and all the crap tessellation, there's no driver update to fix it.

Also, if you had followed DA2's launch, the game was released with NV acknowledging issues and preparing driver updates to fix it. You can read all about it in the huge DA2 thread. No point beating a dead horse: DA2 performing like crap for a few weeks was NV's fault.

Sure there is. You can force a level of tesselation within AMDs drivers.

 

[SirPauly]

That's what I don't understand. One may change the tessellation level if one chooses to improve performance on AMD cards.

 

[Red Hawk]

Of course when things go wrong in DA2 it is always Bioware and Nvidia's fault. AMD can never be blamed. After all they helped add in awesome DX11 effects. DX11 anistropic filtering anyone? Never done before in previous APIs.

Didn't say it was Nvidia's fault (though the 100% reproducible crashes in newer drivers don't help). It's BioWare and EA's fault, for rushing the game and not giving it proper quality assurance testing. I'm sure AMD did nothing to help performance on Nvidia cards (why should they?), but there's no evidence of "features" in DAII that specifically play to AMD's strengths and Nvidia's weaknessess while providing no IQ improvement (like most tessellation in Crysis 2).

 

[krumme]

You have a mobile system and you want to have the same performance as high end desktop graphics cards in Tessellation??

I will suggest you to lower the IQ (you do know you can do that??) or get a desktop PC for gaming

Ofcource i dont expect the same , but tesselation is in fact a technology that can improve the speed. I think we still needed to see that. It seemed to be used for another purpose than image quality.

15 years ago i would never lower the IQ as it hurt my identity, but rather buy a new rig. Needless to say, i dont react the same way today. Man, i am so old, that if my hd3000 is within range, i will just play tf2 on it