Quote Originally Posted by iddqd View Post
Except they can't really do tessellation (or any similar techniques) because then the game would not be backwards-compatible to DX9 (just like BF3), and since this is a cross-platform title, DX9 compatibility is all-important. There's also a fair amount of people who still use Windows XP.

Besides, with their texture streaming tech, tessellation doesn't seem needed, especially for PC's monster graphics memory of (typically) 1gb and over.

Actually, consoles, with their 256mb of graphics memory, would benefit the most from tessellation (or similar data amplification techniques), but sadly they have DX9 GPUs, and therefore it's not possible.

Similarly, RAGE (another cross-platform title) makes no use of tessellation either [does OpenGL even accelerate tessellation? It's not a DirectX engine..]. And why would they bother? Sure, it's a nice trick to get some more data out there, but the id Tech 5 engine has an even better trick (similar to Cry Engine 3's texture streaming, I'm sure) to get you an enormous amount of data. In fact, the amount of data you can put out there is so enormous that they are not repeating any textures or geometry at all, every art asset in every level is uniquely hand-crafted.

Essentially, I guess my point is that doing DX11-exclusive features in a cross-platform title is completely unfeasible. Anyone who expected to see them is foolish. Besides, they probably aren't even needed.

I guess, uh, be patient? Wait 4-5 years, by the time DX13 is out we'll be seeing DX11 features used in every game and cry ceaselessly that developers aren't implemented DX12 and 13 yet because of stupid Playstation 4 and Xbox 720.
Tesslation is not a DX11 exclusive or better you don't need Dx11 to do tesslation. If a gpu vendor has a tesslation solution in its hardware you can use it without dx11. Dx11 just unified it and made it mandatory to have hardware tesslation unit.
You can do tessleation even in software, just look at atis turform, only the 8500 had a hardware tesslator (DX8 and OGL), but you still could enable turform on 9xxx series in software. Plus jfyi the xbox 360 gpu already has a tesslation unti, so if they wanted they could have coded it.