Im saying the same thing Sickamore, amd are not good enough at getting their stuff into games. If they where maybe we would have had tessellation in games many years ago instead of just now.
It's not just about 'getting their stuff into games'.
Some technology is just a lot harder to get into games than others.
For example, when TruForm was introduced, it was the Doom 3 era, and shadow volumes were the next big thing. Especially with Doom 3's approach, where the volumes were generated on the CPU, it was very hard to combine shadows and TruForm, since the shadows wouldn't match the TruForm-tessellated geometry.
So that one could pretty much be ascribed to "unfortunate timing".
When shadowvolumes were replaced with shadowmaps later, this solved that problem... but you still had the problem that only ATi supported TruForm, and generally TruForm doesn't look all that well when you just apply it to regular game geometry.
You'd really need to design your game for TruForm up front, if you want to get good results.
We see that even today... games like Lost Planet 2 and Metro 2033 have DX11 tessellation added 'after the fact', and you see the same ugly 'blown up' geometry that TruForm had. It looks slightly better than back in the TruForm days because we now have much more detailed geometry to begin with, as the hardware is much faster than it was then, but still it doesn't look good if you ask me.
However, since tessellation is now a standard DX11 feature (as in: supported by all vendors and hardware, now and in future generations), and it is more advanced and more powerful than ATi's earlier attempts, it is now more feasible for game developers to invest in tessellation. You get wider support and better results.
It's nice that ATi tried to pioneer tessellation, but it's all about having the right technology at the right time. The same can be said for AMD's onboard memory controller for example. It was the right technology perhaps, but AMD may have been a bit too early. It didn't help them to compete with Intel's Conroe/Kentsfield. And once Intel started integrating the memory controller, they got it right.
Likewise, nVidia seems to have gotten tessellation right on their first DX11 hardware.
