Originally Posted by
Florinmocanu
They didn't use another model lol, they used displacement through tesselation.
How is displacement done? You get a flat plane, you use a black and white texture (which you don't see in-game, it's just used by the engine to do the displacement) to show the high (white) and low (black) parts of the wall and through that the wall gets to look realistic, even if in reality it's just a flat plane.
That's what the purpose of tesselation is, to create new geometry through the gpu, so that you don't raise the base poly count that much.
The tesselation in DX 11 is no the Trueform engine in the Radeon Cards, this is something a bit more complex, it does smoothing and displacement at the same time.