http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404/1
Interesting article about tessellation issues in Crysis 2 after the DX11 update release. A couple of interesting conclusions:
"Crytek's decision to deploy gratuitous amounts of tessellation in places where it doesn't make sense is frustrating, because they're essentially wasting GPU powerand they're doing so in a high-profile game that we'd hoped would be a killer showcase for the benefits of DirectX 11."
"There is another possible explanation. Let's connect the dots on that one. As you may know, the two major GPU vendors tend to identify the most promising upcoming PC games and partner up with the publishers and developers of those games in various ways, including offering engineering support and striking co-marketing agreements. As a very high-profile title, Crysis 2 has gotten lots of support from Nvidia in various forms. In and of itself, such support is generally a good thing for PC gaming. In fact, we doubt the DX11 patch for this game would even exist without Nvidia's urging. We know for a fact that folks at Nvidia were disappointed about how the initial Crysis 2 release played out, just as many PC gamers were. The trouble comes when, as sometimes happens, the game developer and GPU maker conspire to add a little special sauce to a game in a way that doesn't benefit the larger PC gaming community. There is precedent for this sort of thing in the DX11 era. Both the Unigine Heaven demo and Tom Clancy's HAWX 2 cranked up the polygon counts in questionable ways that seemed to inflate the geometry processing load without providing a proportionate increase in visual quality.
Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures. We've seen the effect quite clearly in synthetic tessellation benchmarks. Few games have shown a similar effect, simply because they don't push enough polygons to strain the Radeons' geometry processing rates. However, with all of its geometric detail, the DX11 upgraded version of Crysis 2 now manages to push that envelope. The guys at Hardware.fr found that enabling tessellation dropped the frame rates on recent Radeons by 31-38%. The competing GeForces only suffered slowdowns of 17-21%."
Anyways, thought that was interesting.
Interesting article about tessellation issues in Crysis 2 after the DX11 update release. A couple of interesting conclusions:
"Crytek's decision to deploy gratuitous amounts of tessellation in places where it doesn't make sense is frustrating, because they're essentially wasting GPU powerand they're doing so in a high-profile game that we'd hoped would be a killer showcase for the benefits of DirectX 11."
"There is another possible explanation. Let's connect the dots on that one. As you may know, the two major GPU vendors tend to identify the most promising upcoming PC games and partner up with the publishers and developers of those games in various ways, including offering engineering support and striking co-marketing agreements. As a very high-profile title, Crysis 2 has gotten lots of support from Nvidia in various forms. In and of itself, such support is generally a good thing for PC gaming. In fact, we doubt the DX11 patch for this game would even exist without Nvidia's urging. We know for a fact that folks at Nvidia were disappointed about how the initial Crysis 2 release played out, just as many PC gamers were. The trouble comes when, as sometimes happens, the game developer and GPU maker conspire to add a little special sauce to a game in a way that doesn't benefit the larger PC gaming community. There is precedent for this sort of thing in the DX11 era. Both the Unigine Heaven demo and Tom Clancy's HAWX 2 cranked up the polygon counts in questionable ways that seemed to inflate the geometry processing load without providing a proportionate increase in visual quality.
Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures. We've seen the effect quite clearly in synthetic tessellation benchmarks. Few games have shown a similar effect, simply because they don't push enough polygons to strain the Radeons' geometry processing rates. However, with all of its geometric detail, the DX11 upgraded version of Crysis 2 now manages to push that envelope. The guys at Hardware.fr found that enabling tessellation dropped the frame rates on recent Radeons by 31-38%. The competing GeForces only suffered slowdowns of 17-21%."
Anyways, thought that was interesting.