Crysis 2 Tessellation Article

[3DVagabond]

I'm not running to Nvidia's defense . I'm reminding people (in this thread) the purpose of the patch, is to make a better looking game and thats what it did.
Remember sites like to generate hits, and AMD cards are inferior at tesselation, so this is a attempt to stoke the fanboy fires. Nvidia is working with developers and AMD is issuing press releases posturing the correct use of tessellation.

Do you have anything to say directly about anything in the articles, or the points that they raise? We can always play the "page hits card" about anything on the web and label people who take a stance against something a company has done as "Fanboys" of the competition. That doesn't address the pretenses of the articles.

 

[Will Robinson]

I'm not running to Nvidia's defense . I'm reminding people (in this thread) the purpose of the patch, is to make a better looking game and thats what it did.
Remember sites like to generate hits, and AMD cards are inferior at tesselation, so this is a attempt to stoke the fanboy fires. Nvidia is working with developers and AMD is issuing press releases posturing the correct use of tessellation.

Why not,decided today to turn over a new leaf?


Please stop trolling.

As your fellow members have shown you here, there are plenty of ways to make a good rebuttal. What you did here certainly is not.

Moderator jvroig

 

[PingviN]

I'm not running to Nvidia's defense . I'm reminding people (in this thread) the purpose of the patch, is to make a better looking game and thats what it did.

And this thread is arguing that tessellation has been used excessively, resulting in a higher performance hit than would be necessary given the IQ improvement. This thread is not about the patch in general, it's about the tessellation, which should be clear given the title "Crysis 2 Tessellation Article"

Remember sites like to generate hits, and AMD cards are inferior at tesselation, so this is a attempt to stoke the fanboy fires. Nvidia is working with developers and AMD is issuing press releases posturing the correct use of tessellation.

I'm sorry, but have you even bothered to read the articles? They are quite thorough.

 

[SniperWulf]

Personally, I could care less if it were Nvidia sponsored. What bothers me is the fact that Crytek released this patch in this state in the first place.

I mean, I'm for tessellation and all, but don't just throw it in there for the sake of checking a box. Make good, sensible use of it....

 

[Larries]

I'm not running to Nvidia's defense . I'm reminding people (in this thread) the purpose of the patch, is to make a better looking game and thats what it did.
Remember sites like to generate hits, and AMD cards are inferior at tesselation, so this is a attempt to stoke the fanboy fires. Nvidia is working with developers and AMD is issuing press releases posturing the correct use of tessellation.

I don't know what you think, but I, as a owner of a 560Ti, will be interested to see games optimised with unncessary performance hits removed, just so I can crank up the image quality or get better frames rates on my card.

I (and guess most of us who already have a card) absolutely do not care how much better my 560Ti can run faster than a 6950 because the game introduce uncessary performance hit to make my card look to run "more faster" than in an optimised game.

Unless there is a good reason to introduce the invisible water layer, what Crysis does is not only Nvidia vs AMD card, but also mid-range vs high-end cards.

After all, if all games is well optimised and playable on mid-range cards, why do you need a high end card?

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

I'm not running to Nvidia's defense . I'm reminding people (in this thread) the purpose of the patch, is to make a better looking game and thats what it did.
Remember sites like to generate hits, and AMD cards are inferior at tesselation, so this is a attempt to stoke the fanboy fires. Nvidia is working with developers and AMD is issuing press releases posturing the correct use of tessellation.

WRONG the 6 series is every bit as good at tesselation as Nvidia's cards. Nvidia paid more money so it runs better on their cards. Notice the way its ment to be played and the whispered nvidia logo when you start Crysis 2? There you go, case closed its over Nvidia bought that performance themselves. It has no bearing on the hardware whatsoever between Nvidia and AMD.

Anybody who says otherwise is biased and shouldn't be listened to.

 

[AnandThenMan]

Let's stop pretending Nvidia does not purposely cripple and sabotage game code on competing hardware. It's a pattern with Nvidia, they do it because it's part of how Nvidia thinks, they want to "add value" to theirr hardware, and make sure it runs relatively poorly otherwise.

 

[Firestorm007]

So, now we have a 2nd site review it. They didn't come to the conclusion to accept it and move on. Excessive tessellation was their conclusion.

Here's a 3rd article. They think the tessellation is excessive too.

http://www.behardware.com/articles/...ser-look-at-performance-and-tessellation.html

How many more does it take before some people will call it like it is?

Some people will never call it out for what it is because 1) they are a fanboy 2) because they have a vested interest....It is what it is....I can accept that Nvidia most likely paid them off...That's just fine with me. The patch looks a lot better; and if Nvidia threw them a few bucks, whatever...but please don't pretend that Crytek did it out of the goodness of their heart and didn't give Nvidia some edge in the process..
It's just ridiculous not to think so...

 

[RussianSensation]

WRONG the 6 series is every bit as good at tesselation as Nvidia's cards. Nvidia paid more money so it runs better on their cards. Notice the way its ment to be played and the whispered nvidia logo when you start Crysis 2? There you go, case closed its over Nvidia bought that performance themselves. It has no bearing on the hardware whatsoever between Nvidia and AMD.

Anybody who says otherwise is biased and shouldn't be listened to.

Sorry, your assertion is simply not true. NV has a more robust Tessellation hardware and has allocated more transistors to this feature as well. To claim otherwise is ignorant. There isn't a single benchmark/game which supports your opinion that HD6xxx series is just as good as the GTX4xx/5xx series once you start adding a lot of Tessellation into the mix.

NV is taking advantage of the fact that its cards run faster with Tessellation in this generation by working (paying) with developers to throw massive amounts of Tessellation. It's a great way to try to increase sales of your cards and market some differentiating feature, which runs more favourably on its hardware (it's a fair game from their point of view).

AMD had Tessellation since Radeon 8500 series but hardly talked about it and certainly stopped marketing it after Truform flopped. Why is that? NV knows that Fermi is far ahead in Tessellation this entire generation. It's also one of the reasons AMD introduced the Tessellation scale in their drivers because their 2 Tessellation engines are not sufficient at much higher Tessellation levels. Of course you can argue that a medium level of Tessellation is generally better for a visual/performance hit sweet spot - and most would agree with that. Wait, as soon as HD7000 series improves Tessellation, you'll be sure to hear about it from AMD.....

This isn't anything to cry about. AMD had faster DX9 cards with 9700/9800 series and we didn't deny that. GeForce 6 handled soft shadows better than X800 series. We didn't deny that. AMD's OpenGL drivers were inferior to NV's up to HD5000 series. X1900 series had better AA performance in DX9 shader intensive games over 7900 series. We didn't deny that. HD2900 series had horrible AA performance. We didn't deny that. Every generation, each camp is better at one thing or another. Compromise is the name of the game.

But what we are upset about is that Tessellation should be used efficiently and effectively to improve visuals, not as an afterthought, in an unoptimized way that brings down performance 50% for little to no visual gains.

 

[Barfo]

nvidia user: But but... it hurts my performance during game play, for no reason?
nvidia: the reason is it hurts AMD card users even more!
(17% ouch for us, 21% ouch for them)

This.

 

[WMD]

Lol at Crytek and Nvidia. If you want to cripple the games performance with tessellation at least make it look legitimate and less suspicious. Tessellating flat surfaces with millions of less than 1 pixel polygons while rounded objects receive no tessellation is so full of fail words can't describe it. Oh and that handle on top of the barrier can be rendered with like 50 polygons without using tessellation.

 

[3DVagabond]

Lol at Crytek and Nvidia. If you want to cripple the games performance with tessellation at least make it look legitimate and less suspicious. Tessellating flat surfaces with millions of less than 1 pixel polygons while rounded objects receive no tessellation is so full of fail words can't describe it. Oh and that handle on top of the barrier can be rendered with like 50 polygons without using tessellation.

That would require actual hard work. It's pretty obvious looking at the reviews they applied tessellation to very few objects. They created the ocean model and then tessellated a few models that were mostly flat surfaces. Tessellating more complex models wouldn't be so easy.

This is to be able to say, "It's Dx11, it has tessellation, occlusion maps, improved lighting and shadows (we can show you on these few obvious areas), and boy oh boy are nVidia cards better than AMD".

 

[AtenRa]

I’m a little puzzled as to why the concrete barriers are getting such heavy treatment when it basically makes zero difference to them.

Because the game was created for the Consoles and in DX-9 for the PC a lot of things (Human and Alien Models, vehicles etc) were created with high Polygon count. If the developers would apply Tessellation in the high polygon models the performance hit would be much higher than applying tessellation on the low polygon objects like the concrete barriers. And don’t forget that the Concrete barrier uses the same texture with or without Tessellation and that is why we don’t see any noticeable difference because they are mend to be flat surfaces.

On the other hand, brick walls do produce a depth effect and are clearly much better looking in DX-11 with Tessellation than DX-9 flat brick walls.

If the game is able to display the mesh like that then something must be calculating it. The question is how much of it is rendered, but the point is that the game should be culling all of it before it even hits the GPU.

The water mesh and all polygons are been calculated, but because of the Z-Buffer, no shaders/rasterizing and no textures are been applied in the final outcome that will be projected on the screen.

 

[BFG10K]

Because the game was created for the Consoles and in DX-9 for the PC a lot of things (Human and Alien Models, vehicles etc) were created with high Polygon count. If the developers would apply Tessellation in the high polygon models the performance hit would be much higher than applying tessellation on the low polygon objects like the concrete barriers. And don’t forget that the Concrete barrier uses the same texture with or without Tessellation and that is why we don’t see any noticeable difference because they are mend to be flat surfaces.

You’re missing the point. Tessellation is being applied to a surface that doesn’t benefit from it. It’s an artificial workload that does extra work for nothing.

The water mesh and all polygons are been calculated, but because of the Z-Buffer, no shaders/rasterizing and no textures are been applied in the final outcome that will be projected on the screen.

But the tessellation units are still generating the polygons in question. The game should be culling that surface completely so it shouldn’t be using up any resources. Again, it’s a tessellation workload that doesn’t do anything useful. That’s the point.

 

[Dribble]

The game looks amazing and runs fine on fairly affordable hardware (I can play maxed at 1920p on a GTX 570 which isn't that expensive).

Can anyone show me a game that is prettier then crysis 2 and performs better?

No - well then it obviously isn't that badly optimised - there are plenty of games that are.

 

[PingviN]

The game looks amazing and runs fine on fairly affordable hardware (I can play maxed at 1920p on a GTX 570 which isn't that expensive).

Can anyone show me a game that is prettier then crysis 2 and performs better?

No - well then it obviously isn't that badly optimised - there are plenty of games that are.

No one is arguing Crysis 2 doesn't look good and perform decently, what's up for discussion is whether it is using excessive tessellation. We're not arguing Crysis 2's general optimizations, we're arguing the use of high tessellation levels on objects where it does not show. That would make Crysis 2's tessellation poorly optimized. Still not talking about the game in general. Not talking about the DX11 patch in general. We are, however, talking about tessellation in the DX11 patch.

 

[jvroig]

I have just issued infractions for both anti-AMD and anti-NV posts that are over the line.

This is a fine thread worthy of technical debate. Let's keep it that way.

If you can't post your opinions on why the applied tessellation to the Crysis 2 DX11 patch is good/bad without carrying a torch for your favorite company and shoving it down your opponents' throats, then don't post. You'll just ruin the thread for your fellow members who are taking the time and effort to actually read the article and make sensible, logical posts to describe why they do or do not agree. And you'll just get yourself an infraction or two. It's a lose-lose scenario.


Moderator jvroig

 

[Dribble]

No one is arguing Crysis 2 doesn't look good and perform decently, what's up for discussion is whether it is using excessive tessellation. We're not arguing Crysis 2's general optimizations, we're arguing the use of high tessellation levels on objects where it does not show. That would make Crysis 2's tessellation poorly optimized. Still not talking about the game in general. Not talking about the DX11 patch in general. We are, however, talking about tessellation in the DX11 patch.

Unfortunately from what I can tell no one really has the expertise to answer that question. The only one that could really do that would be one of the guys who developed it.

- What we do know because crytek devs said so was they would have liked to tessellate everything but that wasn't possible with today's hardware so they picked some things to tessellate. This means they knew very well what they were trying to do.

- Therefore it also means that nvidia didn't need to push them to *waste* triangles on a few objects as if they wanted more tessellation there was plenty more to tessellate that isn't tessellated at all. It's also in nvidia's interests to make the game look as pretty as possible which *wasting* triangles wouldn't do.

-We also know that crysis 2 is one if not the best looking game ever, and manages to do that without being a total performance hog.

-Therefore we can assume the crytek devs are more then just competent, they are the best in their field so aren't going to make errors obvious that a load of guys who know very little about how to write a DX11 renderer on some random forum can pick up on.

-We also know the whole point of tesselation is that it is adaptable, so the closer you get the more triangles you see, the further away you get the less triangles you see.

- Therefore yes if you look closely at a concrete block then you get the highest detail version with the most triangles which is what you want as that looks most realistic ... but if you were further away from it the detail and hence triangle count would drop fast.

 

[nemesismk2]

I dont see the problem with Tessellation performing better for Nvidia rather than AMD. Some games have always favoured either AMD or Nvidia. I played Crysis 2 in DX9 with my 6850, it played brilliant, looked great and I enjoyed the game. I am not going to bother with the DX11 upgrade because I have already completed Crysis 2.

 

[AtenRa]

You’re missing the point. Tessellation is being applied to a surface that doesn’t benefit from it. It’s an artificial workload that does extra work for nothing.

I was not talking about why they tessellate unnecessary objects like the concrete barrier, I was only saying that because all other models/objects are already made of high polygon count, the developer was left with little choices as to what he could be able to tessellate. If they would chose to tessellate everything in the screen or human/alien models, the performance hit from that would made the game unplayable even with current high end hardware, so i believe they chose to tessellate smaller objects that already had been made with lower polygon count.

But the tessellation units are still generating the polygons in question. The game should be culling that surface completely so it shouldn’t be using up any resources. Again, it’s a tessellation workload that doesn’t do anything useful. That’s the point.

I was only talking technically and saying that Z-Buffer or Z-Culling will not cull polygons. As you point out, the card clearly tessellate that mesh but the Z-buffer (Culling) not allowing the rest of the rendering to be completed and been projected in the screen (no shaders, no rasterizing and no texturing is happening, only tessellation).

 

[Genx87]

I’m a little puzzled as to why the concrete barriers are getting such heavy treatment when it basically makes zero difference to them.

My guess is it was easy to create and it is all over the game.

 

[Genx87]

Let's stop pretending Nvidia does not purposely cripple and sabotage game code on competing hardware. It's a pattern with Nvidia, they do it because it's part of how Nvidia thinks, they want to "add value" to theirr hardware, and make sure it runs relatively poorly otherwise.

What a conspiracy theory.

 

[Genx87]

And this thread is arguing that tessellation has been used excessively, resulting in a higher performance hit than would be necessary given the IQ improvement. This thread is not about the patch in general, it's about the tessellation, which should be clear given the title "Crysis 2 Tessellation Article"

What does excessively even mean? Is it excessive because one brands hardware chokes on it more than the other? Because you cant see any benefit from it? This looks like how games will be designed going forward. Personally I didnt see any benefit from 16x AA or 16x Anistrophic filtering. But do I advocate we should be capped at 8x?

 

[AdamK47]

The game actually played at a constant 60 FPS (vsync) on my system with everything maxed. It seemed well optimized to me. Better than Metro 2033.

 

[SirPauly]

Let's stop pretending Nvidia does not purposely cripple and sabotage game code on competing hardware. It's a pattern with Nvidia, they do it because it's part of how Nvidia thinks, they want to "add value" to theirr hardware, and make sure it runs relatively poorly otherwise.

Depends on how some look at the data:

The water mesh looks damning but it you add some new data to it:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=31992217&postcount=93

Is this actually possible?