Quote Originally Posted by Florinmocanu View Post
Nope. In CGI effects are calculated resolution independent as well, but then to display them, it takes more time at higher resolution than lower one. Displacement is the best example for this, it is done usually with physical scale in mind (the amount the model is tessellated (1 polygon every 1 mm or 3 mm or 5etc..) determines how detailed the model will be after the displacement is done). So, even if i render at 640x480 or 1024x768, the displacement is done independently on the model.

But, doing displacement at 1024x768 usually gives linear increases in the time of rendering vs 640x480. That's why a lot of times i avoid using displacement, because it's a resource hog.
And that's exactly the point.
The DX11/OpenGL tesselation we are talking about are spawning millions of new polygons in the middle of the pipeline - independent of the rendering resolution.

Your CGI renderer most likely is implementing displacement mapping in a sub-pixel displacement way without generating tons of micro-polygons like we have in the GPU pipeline - so the renderer is resolution dependent.