Originally Posted by
Musho
Why use a crazy amount of it if it's not going to make a difference in picture quality? Just to bring the FPS down? :shrug: Just run the benchmark with the different tessellation options, and try to see the difference. It's extremely hard to spot the differences, so it isn't going to look better if you have to actually search and compare screen shots, just to try and find differences :shrug:
Tessellation is not only there to make games look better. It's also there to make games run better. Instead of using multiple fixed models, swapping them as you move away/towards those models for either higher/lower detailed models, tessellation can actually increase polygon counts on the fly. This saves space, as you will only need 1 model per item you want to render, avoids seeing models pop into more/less detailed models as you move and can be easily scaled down and up to improve performance or to improve visuals. Enough polygons is enough, though. If you can't see the difference anymore, because you are already using enough polygons for all the details, using more won't actually net you a better looking model. It's just going to slow the game down. That's why I think using and benchmarking an extreme amount of tessellation isn't going to be really needed, and will only skew the results, as Nvidia's and ATI's architecture both handle it differently.
Nvidia uses it's shaders to produce tessellation. This means it can allocate more resources towards tessellation as needed. ATI uses a fixed function tessellator, however. This mean as you increase the amounts of tessellation, the tessellator will be bottlenecking the rest of the architecture. That's why it's unfair to benchmark using excessive amounts of tessellation, as it's obviously going to make nVidia look better than ATI, while it's not going to be any benefit to real world games.
ATI's tessellator does look to a bit too slow, though. I guess we'll find out if it's good enough once people start benchmarking heaven with the normal tessellation mode, metro 2033 and grid. I'm really looking forward to comparisons between Fermi and 5870! :up: