Tessellation benchmark and comparison

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HurleyBird

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Apr 22, 2003
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1. It's much more than a 40% hit. Some of the scenes have none or very little use of tessellation, and that pads the FPS numbers. In the heaven benchmark heavily tessellated area take a performance nosedive into unplayable territory on a 5870.

2. Despite how bad that sounds, it really isn't. The heaven benchmark goes overboard with tessellation, putting on so many extra polygons that you could probably cut the poly-count to 1/4 without starting to notice a difference. Benchmarks are designed to stress a system, games are designed to look good. I don't think heaven is indicative of actual game performance.
 
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zmatt

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Nov 5, 2009
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That looks stunning. I can't wait until this goes mainstream. I agree that the benchmark does over do it a bit. The cobblestone roads don't look to comfortable to walk on. You can tell they purposely exaggerated that for the sake of the benchmark.

Even though I couldn't run tessellation I ran the benchmark in DX10 at my native res. It looked great, but I missed the tessellation. I think it will be another key technology that will make games appear more realistic.
 
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Fox5

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2005
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Err, tesselation basically just gives automatic level of detail, and requires less memory/memory bandwidth to acquire the same level of detail.
I wonder how the benchmark would run on a dx10 card if they just upped the level of detail to max on everything all the time, or even implanted a cpu LOD (possibly with multiple models).

Current top end graphics cards are already capable of way more polys than games are pushing, but low end hardware keeps that back. I guess tessellation would allow for more scalability from low to high end hardware, but it requires games to specifically target dx11 before it could work. That, or just limit dx10 cards to a lower level of detail, which could be one of those tragic truths that happen.

Just check out the Dirt 2 and Alien versus Predator tessellation demos. Without tessellation, there's a rather pathetic level of polygon detail (perhaps at the level of the xbox 360 and ps3?), but turn on tessellation and suddenly they become graphical powerhouses. It'd be nice if Microsoft programmed some kind of fall back to the geometry shaders on dx10 cards, it wouldn't be as fast but as least some level of support would be nice.
 
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zmatt

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Nov 5, 2009
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Fox5 said:
Err, tesselation basically just gives automatic level of detail, and requires less memory/memory bandwidth to acquire the same level of detail.
I wonder how the benchmark would run on a dx10 card if they just upped the level of detail to max on everything all the time, or even implanted a cpu LOD (possibly with multiple models).

Current top end graphics cards are already capable of way more polys than games are pushing, but low end hardware keeps that back. I guess tessellation would allow for more scalability from low to high end hardware, but it requires games to specifically target dx11 before it could work. That, or just limit dx10 cards to a lower level of detail, which could be one of those tragic truths that happen.

Just check out the Dirt 2 and Alien versus Predator tessellation demos. Without tessellation, there's a rather pathetic level of polygon detail (perhaps at the level of the xbox 360 and ps3?), but turn on tessellation and suddenly they become graphical powerhouses. It'd be nice if Microsoft programmed some kind of fall back to the geometry shaders on dx10 cards, it wouldn't be as fast but as least some level of support would be nice.
Click to expand...

The feature isn't just tessellation itself, but they way it goes about it. A lot of 3d programs have a tessellation button, btu this is actively increasing the count by a set algorithm in real time. Not just upping the polygon count. The advantage is that you can make low poly count models when you develop a game, and you can let the engine improve them in gameplay. That speed sup dev time and makes the games small GB wise.
 
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Fox5

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2005
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zmatt said:
The feature isn't just tessellation itself, but they way it goes about it. A lot of 3d programs have a tessellation button, btu this is actively increasing the count by a set algorithm in real time. Not just upping the polygon count. The advantage is that you can make low poly count models when you develop a game, and you can let the engine improve them in gameplay. That speed sup dev time and makes the games small GB wise.
Click to expand...

Unless you're doing a normal, geometrical shape (or a shape made up of them), you still have to model the high poly model to create the displacement map. Or at the very least, create the displacement map directly. It doesn't sound like tessellation is anything new to 3d modeling either, just new to real-time 3d, many modeling programs could already handle it.

Don't get me wrong, tesselation is very useful and important, but I don't see it saving the developer any work, they still have to make the high poly model in some way or another.
 
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