Tessellation and the 5870. What the hell is it and should I use it?

ToyYoda03

ToyYoda03

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 1, 2004
Messages
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I just received another piece to my gaming rig, the Radeon 5870. I noticed a new feature called "tessellation." After doing some quick googleing and search, I haven't come to a conclusion as to what this exactly does for me.

Can someone explain it to me in a nutshell? Should I leave it on or disable it? Why or why not?
 
The dragon and the steps are another good example, as well as the roof tiles. Tessallation adds extra polygons to a model to make it look better as you get closer to the object.
 
ToyYoda03 said:
Thank you. I watched it on the highest setting. Maybe it's my eyes but I don't really see a difference.

edit: nevermind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=blZHGKTpS6I#t=203s The bumps on the roads are pretty obvious.
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Run the Heaven Benchmark for yourself, and hit F3 to toggle tessellation in real time to really see it pop.

P.S.

Nice to see they have continued to work on this. Tessellation now has 4 options rather than just on/off. (Disabled/Normal/Moderate/Extreme)
 
LeviathanZERO said:
You are joking, right?
Just out of curiosity, how old are you?
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Seeing as he does not know this I wouldn't refer to him as being possibly underage, I would look upon this person as someone who most likely still gets laid :rolleyes:

ToyYoda03 said:
I just received another piece to my gaming rig, the Radeon 5870. I noticed a new feature called "tessellation." After doing some quick googleing and search, I haven't come to a conclusion as to what this exactly does for me.

Can someone explain it to me in a nutshell? Should I leave it on or disable it? Why or why not?
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I'll keep it short since not much is to be said, tessellation is a new technology wich allows an engine to show more detail, making things seem less comicy perfect and therefor more realistic (you could see is as going from 2D to something closer to 3D) but to be able to do this, you need a fast Vga card.
Othersaid it just means a texture will no longer look like a "flat" texture, but get the shape it's supposed to have in real life.
 
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From that video tessellation made some stuff look better and some stuff worse. I think the road and castle looked worse, it turned it into a cobblestone road into basically a riverbed and the castle looked like who ever put it together was a retard and couldn't get anything remotely straight. The rooftops and dragon looked better and more real.
 
Its an awesome tool but needs to be implemented better. The walls, roof tiles, dragon looked awesome and add a sense of realism. The roadway having that much jagged texture looks unrealistic and painful to walk on, removing the sense of realism. No doubt this will be the future of gaming, but most likely be a few years before mainstream cards will be able to support this adequately, and game companies will need to implement it wisely.
 
munkle said:
From that video tessellation made some stuff look better and some stuff worse. I think the road and castle looked worse, it turned it into a cobblestone road into basically a riverbed and the castle looked like who ever put it together was a retard and couldn't get anything remotely straight. The rooftops and dragon looked better and more real.
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the point is realy just to give you some insight on the dimension this tessellation allows, it doesn't mean every game with this technology will make the stones look bad like in the test.
 
munkle said:
.....it turned it into a cobblestone road into basically a riverbed....
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Direfox said:
The roadway having that much jagged texture looks unrealistic and painful to walk on, removing the sense of realism.
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That video is of an old build, or using 'extreme'. It now has options to lessen the effect making it look more natural, though still awkward to walk on.

SXTC said:
the point is realy just to give you some insight on the dimension this tessellation allows, it doesn't mean every game with this technology will make the stones look bad like in the test.
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Indeed, tis a tech demo, nothing else. That is why it's so over exaggerated.
 
SXTC said:
Seeing as he does not know this I wouldn't refer to him as being possibly underage, I would look upon this person as someone who most likely still gets laid :rolleyes:
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Oh you mean someone like you.

see i can play this game too.

A google search on 'tessellation' would have given him more than the answer he was looking for. A question like this in the video card section on [H]ard is like asking "what is an nvidia?", hence the how old are you comment.

anyway, way off topic, carry on.
 
It's too bad that benchmark is still the only "game" where the effects are actually noticeable. I expect that'll remain the case until we've a new generation of consoles on our hands.
 
LeviathanZERO said:
Oh you mean someone like you.

see i can play this game too.

A google search on 'tessellation' would have given him more than the answer he was looking for. A question like this in the video card section on [H]ard is like asking "what is an nvidia?", hence the how old are you comment.

anyway, way off topic, carry on.
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I thought I was civilized for not having pointed the finger.. :rolleyes:
I was right ;)

Raap said:
It's too bad that benchmark is still the only "game" where the effects are actually noticeable. I expect that'll remain the case until we've a new generation of consoles on our hands.
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Even in benchmarks the effects shown do not always show at their best.
It relies on the enviroment, it's lighting, realism, etc...

Little_4nic8er said:
That video is of an old build, or using 'extreme'. It now has options to lessen the effect making it look more natural, though still awkward to walk on.



Indeed, tis a tech demo, nothing else. That is why it's so over exaggerated.
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Oh it is, but sometimes people need to overdo it so everyone would "understand" what tessellation is about.
It might be easy for you but you would be suprised how much people wouldn't know where to look for if it weren't for overexaggeration
 
Doesn't the Xbox 360 has support for Tessellation? May be isn't practical due to performance issues I guess.
 
evolucion8 said:
Doesn't the Xbox 360 has support for Tessellation? May be isn't practical due to performance issues I guess.
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The X360 GPU supports AMD's old tessellation engine(used in GPUs from the R200 to R600). It's not used since it doesn't have the performance to spare(as you guessed) and that the other big platform(PS3) doesn't have the proper hardware. Add that to the fact that the tessellation in DX11 isn't compatible with what's in the 360(no easy porting from 360 to PC or vice-versa) and it's just wasted die space. But it did give Microsoft the idea to add tessellation to DX so it had some use overall.
 
Kinda disappointed that most AAA games still don't make use of tessellation.

Alien vs Predator did it okay and so did Dragon Age 2, but aside from that, what other games out there use it? How many major games out there even use DX11?
 
Einhanderkiller said:
but aside from that, what other games out there use it? How many major games out there even use DX11?
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Off the top of my head:
Lost Planet 2
HAWX 2
Dirt 2
Civ 5
Bad Company 2(but not tessellation)
Metro 2033
Homefront(not sure if it uses tessellation, but the config files mention it)

Not many, but it's picking up.
 
Einhanderkiller said:
Kinda disappointed that most AAA games still don't make use of tessellation.

Alien vs Predator did it okay and so did Dragon Age 2, but aside from that, what other games out there use it? How many major games out there even use DX11?
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Directx isn't on the market for that long, tessellation is usualy combined but as mentioned above, games that use it start to come on the market and they will flood you sooner then you'd expect ^^
 
SXTC said:
Seeing as he does not know this I wouldn't refer to him as being possibly underage, I would look upon this person as someone who most likely still gets laid :rolleyes:
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So tessellation is like using a ribbed condom?
 
SXTC said:
I guess you could put it that way... :rolleyes:
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yeah, depending on how it's used, it can be used as a geometry setup, or a semi-procedural content generator. Sortof a way to mitigate high poly counts in stored models, and allow for parralax occlusion mapping (what Halo Reach uses, as a rather important componenet, to get insanely long draw distances..... on a 5 year old console stuck on a dx9 mutation (has almost everything dx10, short of the virtualization and paging that would of made the memory subsystem even easier to manage, lol....)), so tesselation has it's useage, I guess if I was really silly, I could rig it to assist in geometry setup.... in a sense, so maybe my first statement on dx10 geometry shaders is a bit wonky :p


Nah, this is just the ramblings of an unpaid hobby dev :(, ignore it, I have *no* interest in how devs pull every ounce of power from an ancient system. :rolleyes: Tesselation is one way on the xbox360 that it's done. It can be used in a good way, just have to see if it's ever gonna be done....
 
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