What are RT-patches / N-Patches?

[Raspewtin]

I assume RT is Nvidia proprietary and N is ATI from what I have read (please correct me if I am wrong) but I have no clue what they are, what they do, etc. What are these? Thanks a ton!

 

[Teasy]

N-Patch tesselation is the real name for ATI's truform. What it does basically is create a curved surface by taking a flat triangle curving it and then making it into lots of smaller triangles. So you put one triangle into the GPU and out pops a curved surface made up of lots more triangles then were sent in. So games that look blocky because of low poly counts can be made to look much smoother via N-patch tesselation.

 

[Raspewtin]

thanks for the explanation