What's the big deal with DX11 and Tessellation?

[Bolkonsky]

Everyone said that DX10 was all about developing, etc, but DX11 is all the rage now.

What's the big deal with it? (And yes, this comes from me seeing a thread about it in the Shogun 2 section.) I've been seeing this everywhere now. "Will this support DX11?" In my opinion, it's just a big marketing ploy. Emperor's New Clothing type of thing.

ATI had it before DX11 even came out, and I read somewhere that Xbox 360 had it as well.

"DX9 is soo outdated!"

Riiiiight. How many of these people actually know what tessellation does? It's like an inverted lod system, nothing huge. It won't make the games look any nicer than they could have. It'll just allow developers to make the game with less mind for lower end systems. Or higher end systems, rather, as they'll be able to scale it up.

Or am I just completely off the wagon?

[Doono]

Tessllation is one of the largest changes to game design thats happened in years, it effectivaly can eliminate the blockiness we have all come to expect from games. For example a ball on older systems could be smoothed to some degree but it would never be perfectly round, using tessellation it's possible to take this ball and smooth it to near perfection.

The real advantage of dx 11 is performance enhancments, it may not look any better than it would in dx 10, ignoring tessellation, however it should perform far better.

[Bolkonsky]

Tessllation is one of the largest changes to game design thats happened in years, it effectivaly can eliminate the blockiness we have all come to expect from games. For example a ball on older systems could be smoothed to some degree but it would never be perfectly round, using tessellation it's possible to take this ball and smooth it to near perfection.

The real advantage of dx 11 is performance enhancments, it may not look any better than it would in dx 10, ignoring tessellation, however it should perform far better.

Well, tessellation has been around since DX9. Radeon had several cards capable of it, long before it was released with DX11. Besides, when you see a scene "with" tessellation, and a scene without out, it's not like the difference can't be made on DX9 or 10. It can. Tessellation just allows you to almost invert the lod process. Rather than make the highest possible graphics, and scale down in-game, developers can now make the lowest possible graphics, and scale up runtime, which is huge for them, but not all that huge for us.

It eliminates the necessity of lods (though they may still be used in terrain, I don't know if tessellation can auto-scale down on distance) and saves storage space primarily, it seems.

The parallel processing improvements (multi-threading CPU, CUDA Core/Stream Processor optimisations, Compute Shader isn't as render centric) results in a better ultilisation of the GPU, and presumably, better performance with higher graphical quality. It also gives the developers the tools to create more realistic or creative environments when it comes to the little things like shadows, post processing and lighting. That seems like a good thing to me.

I personally think that tessellation on current graphics cards is more of a gimmick than anything, but I am looking forward to full DX 11 games like Battlefield 3 in the future.

DX 9 can still result in great games, but it is outdated. For me, it's not a matter of features that makes DX 11 great, it's the refinement and programability (lol not a word I assume).

This. The GPGPU has huge potential in my opinion, and it seems like me that DX11 is just a better DX10, nothing huge, just overhauled. Sort of like the relationship between Vista and 7.

They'll release DX12 and Windows 8 though, once they market those sandy bridge CPUs.

[Stavroforos]

Well, tessellation has been around since DX9. Radeon had several cards capable of it, long before it was released with DX11. Besides, when you see a scene "with" tessellation, and a scene without out, it's not like the difference can't be made on DX9 or 10. It can. Tessellation just allows you to almost invert the lod process. Rather than make the highest possible graphics, and scale down in-game, developers can now make the lowest possible graphics, and scale up runtime, which is huge for them, but not all that huge for us.

It eliminates the necessity of lods (though they may still be used in terrain, I don't know if tessellation can auto-scale down on distance) and saves storage space primarily, it seems.



This. The GPGPU has huge potential in my opinion, and it seems like me that DX11 is just a better DX10, nothing huge, just overhauled. Sort of like the relationship between Vista and 7.

They'll release DX12 and Windows 8 though, once they market those sandy bridge CPUs.

If they do that and it's not Win 7 compatible and with current graphics cards I'll be angry.

[mrcrusty]

If they do that and it's not Win 7 compatible and with current graphics cards I'll be angry.

Lol you won't be alone.

[Ishan]

Lol you won't be alone.

I ain't upgrading up my or buying a new one before 2012 lol the computer market is highly unstable right now.

[mrcrusty]

The parallel processing improvements (multi-threading CPU, CUDA Core/Stream Processor optimisations, Compute Shader isn't as render centric) results in a better ultilisation of the GPU, and presumably, better performance with higher graphical quality. It also gives the developers the tools to create more realistic or creative environments when it comes to the little things like shadows, post processing and lighting. That seems like a good thing to me.

I personally think that tessellation on current graphics cards is more of a gimmick than anything, but I am looking forward to full DX 11 games like Battlefield 3 in the future.

DX 9 can still result in great games, but it is outdated. For me, it's not a matter of features that makes DX 11 great, it's the refinement and programability (lol not a word I assume).

[Big Boss]

Right now, no significant graphical boosts can happen unless we make the next big jump, like into full raytracing or whatever. So because of that, DX11 is all about efficiency. Its purpose is to allow developers to develop games that look good relative to DX9, but in significantly less time. Instead of having to model every little detail, now modellers can simply make the basic shape and let tesselation do the rest. It should also make more efficient use of the consumers available hardware. If you have two games that look exactly the same, one DX9 and one (proper) DX11, the DX11 game should run quicker because it has access to a dedicated tesselator, direct compute, and a whole slew of other efficiency features. (If you compare a game that can run in DX9 and DX10/11, the DX10/11 should run quicker because its more efficient, but because developers are so used to DX9, it is usually more optimized. Hopefully this will start changing soon as XP and DX9 starting dying.)

[Dewy]

ATi cards have had fixed function tessellation for about a decade now, and yes that includes the 360, but it was hardly used. OpenGL had tessellation years before DirectX, IIRC it was a vendor extension made by ATi. However both nvidia and ATI are planning to use the same DirectX11 tessellation pipeline, and are planning dedicated tessellation hardware, which will mean tessellation will become much more prominent feature in games.