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Tessellation??

J

jpinks

Member
Ok I am upgrading to a 5870 for my rig and am wondering about the future. It seems that using tessellation in DX11 on the 5XXX seems to kill the fps on these. Is tessellation going to be that big to game devs?? The reason I ask is all the info I see on this seems to go both ways. Just looking to the future and dont want to wait another 30 days for Nvidia.
 
It probably will be big but not for awhile. I suspect by the time we have a lot of games needing high tesselation performance that 5870 will be a low end card.
If you are that worried about wait a month. Not like the 5870 wont be there on Mar 26th.
 
Do you think the 5870's will improve on how they do on Tessellation or is that gonna be a 6 series improvemnet. I always try to buy something with a little bit of future proofing if I can. I dont build a new pc but every 2 or 3 years if I can control myself 🙂 Just dont want to be needing a new system next summer 🙂
 
jpinks said:
Ok I am upgrading to a 5870 for my rig and am wondering about the future. It seems that using tessellation in DX11 on the 5XXX seems to kill the fps on these. Is tessellation going to be that big to game devs?? The reason I ask is all the info I see on this seems to go both ways. Just looking to the future and dont want to wait another 30 days for Nvidia.
Click to expand...

Where did you get that it kills the FPS?
The test I saw it caused a ~10% hit vs having it off with all other settings the same (in AvP).
 
GaiaHunter said:
The big performance hit is soft shadows not tesselation.
Click to expand...

Exactly.
Tessellation on vs off is only a 10% difference, which isn't massive.
And in the Dirt 2 test, it's DX9 vs DX11, which isn't tessellation vs no tessellation.
No one so far seems to have compared a real world T vs no T situation to show the impact of tessellation.
 
It depends very much on how tessellation is used. So far it's use has been very limited e.g. dirt 2 it effects the water and the crowd. tbh it's use is so limited it's only really noticeable in static screen shots. As the tessellation was basically added by ati it's not surprising they've tweaked it to make it run well with their cards. However if more stuff was tessellated the impact would be much larger.

Fermi is meant to be a tesselation monster, much better at it then the 5870. Combine this with the fact TWIMTBP is much bigger then ati's GITG expect to see most games with tesselation tweaked for fermi in the future. This probably means a lot more tessellation at max settings, more then the radeons can handle.

That said as everything is currently a DX9c console port, and game dev's really only bother adding anything extra when nvidia/ati push them to do it. Until the next gen consoles arrive DX10 and 11 are basically an afterthought.
 
Dribble said:
Fermi is meant to be a tesselation monster, much better at it then the 5870. Combine this with the fact TWIMTBP is much bigger then ati's GITG expect to see most games with tesselation tweaked for fermi in the future. This probably means a lot more tessellation at max settings, more then the radeons can handle.
Click to expand...

Right now we have no numbers on that at all. It is not meant to be a "monster" at it any more than ATI is, the method is just very different with far more general computing cores in the gt100. Nvidia should be better at tessellation in situations where the GPU is not being taxed heavily by other rendering. We have no idea what it will look like in a normal gaming situation, but it is likely both nvidia and ATI will take the same performance hit in the end when it is turned on. In some games we might even see the ATI cards pull ahead.

Until we get cards in hand and can see the hit caused by tessellation in situations with AA, with higher resolutions, etc. we should all take the crazy performance we see in unigine with a grain or two of salt.
 
Ungine heaven benchmark is really the only test we have right now of heavy tesselation.
It may not reflect real game performance since it seems they basically used tesselation for absolutely everything. The good news though is that tesselation seems to scale incredibly well since you see in posted benchmarks 5770 crossfire is significantly better than a single 5870 in that test. I think worst case in the future you could pick up a 5830 or something in the future just for the tesselation.
 
Dribble said:
tbh it's use is so limited it's only really noticeable in static screen shots.
Click to expand...

Actually I think it's more noticeable when you're moving. The extra polys means you can look at the object from a different angle and still see depth, instead of making a flat object appear to have depth through bump mapping or other techniques.

I don't think static screenshots do it justice at all.
 
Thanks for the input guys. I just wasnt sure what to make of Tesselation and the articles kinda had me wondering. I hope to get another year or 2 out of my current PC before building a new one so I can hand this one off to my kids. Just want to make sure it will have some life left in it when I do.
 
jpinks said:
Ok I am upgrading to a 5870 for my rig and am wondering about the future. It seems that using tessellation in DX11 on the 5XXX seems to kill the fps on these. Is tessellation going to be that big to game devs?? The reason I ask is all the info I see on this seems to go both ways. Just looking to the future and dont want to wait another 30 days for Nvidia.
Click to expand...

Part of this will depend on what future console ports will be using and what ATI hardware spec will be powering them.

However, With the advent of 3D TVs now and in the future we may see this feature progressively increasing.
 
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