Regarding your point on AMD not having much tessalation power, isn't this why AMD is touting adapative tessalation, to make more restrictive/intelligent use of tessalation power and not have it go wasted on extreme settings that show little/no visual benefit? I think H.A.W.X 2, the demo pre-release surprise bench, is locked in on the extreme setting.
The whole point of tessellation is that it is adaptive. If it's all fixed anyway, why not just precalc it all, like games have always been doing?
Unigine Heaven is adaptive, and so is HAWX 2. They don't just bruteforce all triangles down to the maximum level of tessellation. Run Unigine Heaven in wireframe mode, and you'll see how it dynamically adds and removes triangles when objects get closer or move further away, even on the extreme setting. The setting merely dictates how detailed the adaptive tessellation should be. At lower settings, it will stop subdividing the triangles sooner, resulting in lower detail. But other than that, the algorithm is exactly the same: always adaptive.
Where AMD is hurt is in their limited throughput.
I mean, if you take one triangle over the entire screen, and tessellate it down to triangles of about 16 pixels, as AMD suggests... then that is still adaptive tessellation...
It will not work well on AMD's hardware though, because the pain is in the conversion of 1 triangle to such a large number.
AMD can only do limited amplification of triangles, so you need to feed it pretty detailed geometry to begin with, and then have limited subdivision done by the tessellator, eg each triangle converted to 4 smaller ones.
But that is not how tessellation is meant. Tessellation is meant to serve two purposes:
1) Reduce the overall memory/bandwidth required for geometry, by generating details on-the-fly.
2) Improve image quality by smoothly moving from lower levels of detail to higher levels of detail, and avoiding any kind of undersampling/oversampling problems.
But in order to achieve these two things, you need to be able to handle a large range of tessellation factors, so you can start with very low detail geometry, and have it tessellated down to almost per-pixel details when required (again, this is all adaptive).
Since AMD's range is so limited, you can't really achieve either of the purposes for tessellation. You need to feed it highly detailed geometry in the first place, which means you still need a lot of memory/bandwidth. And you still need to rely on 'oldskool' multiple levels of fixed geometry, with their popping and undersampling/oversampling issues.
Bottom line is just: AMD's tessellation is a bit of a failure. Just like the geometry shader was a failure for both AMD and nVidia in DX10. You couldn't do what you wanted to do, because throughput was too slow.
AMD fell for the same trap again in DX11, nVidia went with a complete redesign, which apparently works much better (although we're still not quite there yet).
AMD is trying to put up a smokescreen by trying to make the focus on triangle size, but that is not the REAL issue here. The real issue is that their tessellator is a bottleneck. It cannot subdivide triangles and spit them out fast enough to keep the rest of the GPU busy. That's why nVidia chose to do a fully parallelized implementation, rather than a serial one (as I said, that's the mistake made with the geometry shader, which theoretically could already do a bit of tessellation, it just couldn't spit out the triangles fast enough).
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