And perhaps more interesting is that this generated terrain can be deformed dynamically by manipulating the height map. But the older units could not be addressed whatsoever in DirectX as the API did not support itĪnother good example for the usage of tessellation would be terrain building. This technique is especially useful for creating complex-looking terrain using a combination of very simple base geometry with a height map, and a texture map. Tessellation isn't something new, ATI already had a hardware tessellation unit in their GPUs for years. Now some of you might have noticed it already from previous reviews. This process can now be done 100% at GPU level in hardware without a significant impact on performance.įor DirectX 11 the tessellation portion of the pipeline has been wrapped with two new shader types that can be used, the Hull Shader and the Domain Shader. So by recursively applying a subdivision rule we can increase the number of polygons. It's anno 2010, and we demand more detailed objects in our 3D scene. There's a small number of polygons in there. Now at the first frame you can see a face. An object divided into quads and subdivided into triangles for convenient calculation. Triangles or quadrilaterals are two commonly used polygons in drawing graphical objects because computer hardware can easy manipulate and calculate these two simple polygons. To describe object surface patterns, tessellation breaks down the surface of an object into manageable polygons. Tessellation is the process of subdividing a surface into smaller shapes. Tessellation simply means increasing your polygon count to get more detail. With the arrival of DX11 class graphics cards ATI and NVIDIA now include hardware tessellation units inside the GPU's, fully programmable. What is tessellation? Simply put it's adding more detail to 3D objects, real-time on the fly. We are going to spend an entire page on this feature that both DX11 class graphics cards from NVIDIA and ATI will have embedded. So the biggest DirectX 11 feature that I am excited about personally is that we'll finally have a hardware tessellation unit inside the GPU that DirectX can utilize. Tesselation can be applied on numerous objects in a 3D scene. So in the future what you will see in games is a much more complex and better looking environment. That doesn't mean that it isn't a huge step forward with games to come though as you can add object complexity in a fairly cheap series of compute cycles on over the GPU - game developers want this as it saves them time creating complex geometry and objects. And with the current games and titles out there, sure I agree. Well to explain that we first need to understand what it is really.įirst off, let me say that I am visiting our forums often and have seen the way you guys react on Tesselation, like it is a non-feature.
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