Is there any truth that AMD cards are bad at Tessellation

[Kaapstad]

Well lets find out

What would be helpful is if some people can run the Heaven 4 bench with everything maxed except the tessellation which should be set to off. If anyone has a GTX 780, GTX 780ti or Titan and can do this, when i get home from work in the morning I will do the same with my 290X.

In theory if the AMD cards are bad at tessellation, by turning it off in the heaven 4 bench then my 290X should be able to close the gap.

If anyone is up for it I think this will be an interesting exercise and may answer a few questions.

 

[Kaapstad]

Good idea Kapston. I'll be up for this... when i get a working motherboard.

Cheers Lt.

 

[Kaapstad]

No there isn't, there is however Nvidia and there general shady stupidity of ruining everything for the sake of winning.

Tessellation is predictable and provable. Grab a piece of paper, draw a big triangle, split it into two more, keep doing this. You see how eventually you get to a point that you can't actually see new triangles? What happens is, there absolutely, categorically IS a limit beyond which tessellation is absolutely worthless. So sensible hardware makers design a tessellation unit to work effectively at this level and waste no hardware on levels you can't ever see......

Then you have Nvidia, why not over engineer the tessellator, then pay a few games to use tessellation WAY beyond a level you can physically see... but your hardware will cope great with it and AMD hardware won't.

It's silly games, it's not realistic, you can only induce a massive performance delta between AMD/Nvidia via tessellation at a level you can see zero effect from.

Benchmarking is pointless, enable the tessellation limit in control panel and AMD drivers should limit the excess and useless tessellation from being done, I don't know if it would effect benchmark results. But it's now Nvidia are getting such good tessellation results. Personally I don't care how fast my card can tessellate beyond a level of detail no screen made today can actually show.

This is exactly no different to what Nvidia did with Crysis 2(I forget which one it was to be honest, 2 or 3 I think anyway). Massively massively over tessellate a completely flat object to make something that topples AMD hardware, doesn't topple the Nvidia tessellator, but offered precisely zero IQ improvement. We're talking about Nvidia pushing tessellation up to sub pixel changes that can't possibly be seen... the fact that Nvidia is wasting transistors to do this faster just to be able to mess around in benchmarks is a joke.

There is a crap way to do tessellation, a smart way, and a completely mental only out to cheat in benchmarks way... guess which way Nvidia went.

I am not sure that AMD cards are as bad at Tessellation as some people say, I find my 290Xs seem to do quite well with Tessellation from the limited amount i have seen. This is the reason for doing the above exercise to see if it is the Tessellation in Heaven holding the cards back or it is something else.

 

[Kaapstad]

Stock 290X @1000/1250

4930k @4.7

With extreme tessellation

Spoiler

With tessellation disabled

Spoiler

Increase in FPS 35.45%


I will be back in a bit after I have tried the same on a single Titan.

 

[Kaapstad]

Stock Titan @837/1502

3930k @4.7

With extreme tessellation

Spoiler

With tessellation disabled

Spoiler

Increase in FPS 39.39%

 

[Kaapstad]

The above two sets of tests seem to be a turn up for the books. The Titan seems to lose more performance when running extreme tessellation than the 290X.

If this is true

Are AMD cards really that bad on tessellation ?

Also if it is not the tessellation holding the AMD cards back on the Heaven 4 bench, then what is holding them back ?

Perhaps more people with AMD and NVidia cards can do the same as me with tests for extreme tessellation and tessellation disabled.

 

[Kaapstad]

The Nforce2000 chip does not like XDMA bridgeless crossfire, so im getting the same board as you, p8z77 ws. Should be here tuesday.

What do you recon on the above, by the looks of it my 290X performs better when using tessellation than my Titan.

Even though the Titan is faster the % gap closes when tessellation is turned on.

Just worked out that with the Tessellation on extreme the Titan is 6.14% faster

With the Tessellation turned off the Titan is 9.23% faster

 

[Kaapstad]

I'm not sure. I always thought it was to do with tessellation but maybe its not.

The point is the 290X has made a better job of handling the Tessellation than the Titan.

 

[Kaapstad]

Must be something else then i guess. I wonder how things stack up on the older version of Unigine? Maybe its something in this version that just favours GK. In games 290's handle tessellation fine though so i guess it should not come as a major surprise.

I don't know how much tessellation there is in the batman bench but the 290Xs seem to do ok on that as well.

 

[Kaapstad]

Seems Techreport beat me to it with TessMark. There isn't a great deal in it, but Nvidia cards are still the better at it with insane settings. Unigine engine seems to match your tests Kaap

http://techreport.com/review/25509/amd-radeon-r9-290x-graphics-card-reviewed/6

Does beg the question what is holding the 290s back so much in Heaven

I have heard many times that AMD cards are bad at tessellation but this does not seem to be the case, for the Hawaii GPUs anyway.

But yes it does beg the question what is holding the 290s back in heaven.