Quote Originally Posted by Farinorco View Post
Regarding the tesselation performance of Fermi, I'd wait to see the comparison in real world games. IF (and I don't know if that's true, false, or somewhat in between) NV100 relies more in CUDA processors to solve tesselation calculations and RV870 relies more in fixed performance dedicated hardware, I'd expect the first to have a huge advantage in a nearly synthetic benchmark with most of its load being tesselation (because Fermi could use more resources to do it), but then, the situation would rebalance severely when complex shaders should be computed in addition to tesselation (like it would be the most likely case in most real world games). The heaven benchmark seems to be pretty heavy on tesselation, but much lighter in any other kind of shader. Maybe that's why NV are focusing so much on Unigine Heaven benchmark. Maybe not. We will see... when we have proper reviews and real world use cases.
Exactly my thoughts. I'm not buying NVIDIA's magical tessellation performance story yet.

I have doubt that NVIDIA simply invest so much in dedicated tessellation hardware. It's probably more likely that they use the "cuda cores" to do tessellation in exchange for shader performance.

If that's the case, their DX 11 driver will have some delicated load balancing to do. It must decide how many cores should be reserved for tessellation for each game. Not neccessarily an elegant solution.


Until we see performances of real games, I'm not holding my breath.