It probably over tesselates.
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7970 vs GTX 580 in nVidia’s Endless City tessellation demo
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It probably over tesselates.
Explain what 'overtessellation' would mean?
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look up Tech Report and Crysis 2, for all intents and purposes it tessellates beyond a level of detail you can actually visually see.
AMD doesn't run into a brick wall with tessellation there is a point where more tessellation can't and won't ever be seen and Crysis 2 amongst other things, tessellate beyond a reasonable degree just to punish AMD for not providing something NO ONE NEEDS.
Think of tessellation like this, get a piece of paper, draw a triangle, divide that into two triangles, keep subdividing.... indefinitely, at what point can you see nothing but lines and can't distinguish new triangles..... and you've met AMD's "tessellation" limit while Nvidia's overtessellation in certain programs, goes well beyond this.
Even worse is WHERE Nvidia has done this, they didn't get something tessellate it brilliantly then over tessellate it, they took a flat, boring surface on a road bollard type thing, tessellated it, then over tessellated it and you can't see a difference between them(yes the light on top but that isn't over tessellated) the FLAT sides of the bollard gain zero height from tessellation, yet are tessellated to that degree just to hurt AMD performance and not for any IQ improvement at all.
The stinker of it is, it hurts Nvidia's cards performance... just less badly.
With tessellation there is, what games can reasonably achieve,(not much yet) what would be fantastic to see on all cards(think Heaven benchmark), and then there is tessellating FLAT surfaces that gain zero IQ to a degree that even if it wasn't a flat surface, wouldn't make a difference.
AMD are aiming for Heaven but not there, Nvidia are aiming for the latter, and for benchmarking contests, not for IQ, and they can't offer any better in game tessellation when it matters than AMD.
I've said for a long time, if Nvidia devoted their vast spending power in terms of game developement, towards actually improving games rather than sabotaging AMD in new and stupid ways, I might have an Nvidia card due to better actual gaming experience.
Oh, Crysis 2 is also set up to tessellate the water, which incidentally goes underneath the island(IE its everywhere on levels with water in) even though it can't be seen by Nvidia or AMD users, there is needless, stupid tessellation happening on an item you can't see.
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107FPS average @ 2560x1440, 8x MSAA + "Quality" FXAA
Well, I have two things to say about that:
1) This is not Crysis 2
2) How are visuals relevant when you are benchmarking performance? All that matters is that the workload is the same on all systems we are comparing, is it not?
You're missing a key point in the story here:
It's all relative, it depends on how large the triangle is.
Tessellation factors are a *relative* factor, not an *absolute* factor.
If you run Endless City in wireframe mode, it is obvious that the polygons are still relatively large... However, unlike most games, the geometry itself is designed for tessellation, so the geometry is very lowpoly, and the actual detail comes from the tessellation step. This means that the tessellation factors will be higher than in most games, such as Crysis 2, where they are adding tessellation on top of geometry that in itself was already designed to encode the detail for DX9-level hardware.
AMD runs into a brick wall because it cannot handle large tessellation factors very well... Which in itself doesn't say anything about how large the polygons are, or what the polygon count is, because that depends on what input you are feeding. All it means is that the GPU chokes when there is a large amplification of triangles inside the pipeline.
But, basically you are saying: Any level of tessellation that AMD can't handle is 'overtessellation', I heard that one before.
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Nope tessellation on flats surfaces is a waste period.
I also though the tessellation in Dirt2 on the crowd was a waste as well because they still looked like cardboard cut outs.
Alien v Pred, again rubbish.
Tessellation use atm is used to polish a cow-pat.
nVidia’s Endless City tessellation unimpressed.
Unigine Heaven is how it should be done.
I also though the tessellation in Dirt2 on the crowd was a waste as well because they still looked like cardboard cut outs.
Alien v Pred, again rubbish.
Tessellation use atm is used to polish a cow-pat.
nVidia’s Endless City tessellation unimpressed.
Unigine Heaven is how it should be done.
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Endless City uses tessellation in a very different way from any of the games you mention (with which I totally agree: every game out there today with tessellation is poorly done).
That's funny... because people thought Heaven was really cool when the Radeon HD5000 series launched.
Then when the GeForce 400 series, it was all fake, cheating and overtessellation!
And now it's okay again? Make up your mind!
As far as I can tell, the acceptance of Heaven is directly proportional to how well AMD's flavour-of-the-month performs in it.
Now your making things up as i personally said nothing of the sort and neither do i remember others saying it.
The only thing i have ever seen is in the context of looks like the cobble stones are over the top because they would never really be so bumpy.
Because how it looks is all that matters as that's its purpose and anything more that is not contributing to it is a waste.
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Actually no. It is a benchmark. How it looks is irrelevant. All that matters is that it runs the exact same code on all hardware so you can do apples-to-apples comparison on performance. That is its purpose.
Oh, and I don't have to make things up. Discussion on Heaven overtessellation here (complete with references to nVidia paying off developers etc): http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1526641&postcount=41
There's probably lots more if you bother to search for forum threads.
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Making things up and being pedantic.
Not making things up, see above.
I'm talking about you telling me to make my mind up and others here on this forum, none of us are accountable for what other's may say on another forum.
So in regards to us here you are making things up.
No, I wasn't telling you personally to make your mind up. I was speaking in the general sense that people should make their minds up (not my fault that English is rather limited in this area) about Heaven, as it keeps going back and forth. As I say, it depends on how AMD's flavour-of-the-week is doing.
If you ask me, Heaven would qualify far better for the term 'overtessellation' than Endless City (if I were to take such a term seriously in the first place).
Namely, it may not tessellate flat surfaces, but the other surfaces do get insane amounts of subdivision at the higher tessellation settings.
Endless City balances out the average triangle size far better over the entire screen. One could argue that Endless City is actually 'undertessellating', since you can clearly see the spikes showing some aliasing as the level of detail increases. It could look better with a bit more detail.
However, since Heaven is just a benchmark, I don't see a problem with it taking tessellation settings over-the-top, so we can see what the hardware is REALLY capable of.
Now, an oft-heard excuse was that the GTX480 and 580 series were 'overengineered' (a similar term to 'overtessellated'), and that the Radeons were more efficient, fine-tuned designs that could handle what games required. Apart from the obvious broken chicken-and-egg logic there, people still had half a point.
But the shoe is on the other foot now... The HD7970 throws far more transistors at the problem than a GTX680, yet it still can't tessellate anywhere near as well. Apparently nVidia wasn't just 'overengineering' their design and just throwing a ton of transistors at the problem with brute force.
General sense can only be used when its is how people feel generally which in the context of this thread and the members here it is not.
So when talking to people here don't quote them and then reply as if they said something else because someone elsewhere would have.
Yea, whatever... I clearly said:
"That's funny... because people thought Heaven was really cool when the Radeon HD5000 series launched."
Not sure how you can still think the context is you, or this thread.
If you search the net your always going to find people with a different view, so you cant use that to generalise everyone's comments and on a forum where those views are not shared and reply as if we share them.
You cant just put every AMD user into one big basket and treat them all as one.
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People don't really understand tessellation. Sometimes you have to over tessellate some surfaces to make sure you get high enough resolution sub-division on adjacent triangles to properly fill in the detail without issues with seams/t-junctioning, etc. granted a lot of developers understand it almost as poorly and just slap a silly high level over everything and say "job done" as well
People don't really understand tessellation. Sometimes you have to over tessellate some surfaces to make sure you get high enough resolution sub-division on adjacent triangles to properly fill in the detail without issues with seams/t-junctioning, etc. granted a lot of developers understand it almost as poorly and just slap a silly high level over everything and say "job done" as well
Thing is, that is not a problem. At least, not on nVidia's hardware.
Crysis 2 in DX11 mode is about as fast as in DX9 mode on nVidia hardware. And DX11 adds more than just tessellation. It also has heavier post-processing.
The whole notion of 'overtessellation' is ridiculous. I guess those people never heard of Pixar, and have no idea how their REYES renderer works.
They tessellate everything to sub-pixel level (micropolygons). Even the most heavily tessellated games and benchmarks don't have anywhere near that amount of detail. And is Pixar 'overtessellating'? Of course not. They are tessellating as much as they need to to get the best possible visual results. And those come from sub-pixel polygons which will then be accumulated and antialiased.
This is exactly where we are heading eventually. DX11 has not even scratched the surface yet.
Just because AMD's implementation plainly sucks, and most games have lousy tessellation bolted-on to console-port geometry doesn't mean that tessellation itself is bad, let alone that it will go away.
Reminds me of developers who ignored Vista because they thought it was a crappy OS, and as a result didn't bother to fix Vista compatibility issues in their code either.
The joke was on them when Windows 7 turned out to be 'Vista 2.0', and they had to fix the same bugs anyway... except now their customers were actually using Windows 7, so now the pressure was on. Serves them right, idiots... What the heck did they think Windows 7 was going to be like? XP 2.0? Riiiight...
AMD is basically in the way of the progress of graphics.