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akb825 wrote:

What do you mean about tessellation in OGL 3.0? Tessellation is something that's API independent and is generally done on the software side, with the exception being geometry shaders. (which IIRC are supported in OpenGL 3.0)

I mean analogous to how tesselation is a formal part of DX11, altho the 360 has hardware tesselation, as have ATi cards for some time now (from the 2xxx on). NV chips/cards lack that, and apparently will until they release DX11-compliant parts.

Since Halo 3 has geometry out to the visible horizon, a point Bungie emphasized from the 'Making of Announce' trailer on, I've assumed they used it; and with NV lacking anything analogous, my PC port will be sadly delayed for reasons of "fairness."

I've been at this one for awhile.

Features include new shader technology that begins to allow developers to position GPUs as more general-purpose parallel processors, rather than being dedicated solely to graphics processing; better multi-threading capabilities; and hardware-based tesselation.

Said newly promoted Microsoft's Entertainment Business Division CTO Chris Satchell during a Gamefest keynote, "We want to break away from purely having a paradigm of pixels, vertices and shaders."

http://www.maclife.com/forums/topic/106778  and elsewhere

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i … tory=19522

I have some memory of tesselation in future being doable on both geometry shaders and dedicated units, but I'm having a tough time pinning that down.

An example...

ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 Feature Summary
...

Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

My bolds.

It's been mentioned here and there for some time, but apparently, off the 360, dev support isn't there, as NV doesn't haz it, and won't for some time.

I was finally able to find a description other than "OMG BUZZWORD THIS IS TEH COOLZORZ" on the Wikipedia page for the R600. It looks interesting, but since it's trying to generalize improving detail on the geometry (kind of like image enhancement, but for 3D) I wonder how easy it would be to set up for each model, and how often does it ends up giving you a shape you don't want. Even if it became available on all hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if developers still manually handle their LODs to make sure it always looks right.

akb825 wrote:

I wonder how easy it would be to set up for each model, and how often does it ends up giving you a shape you don't want. Even if it became available on all hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if developers still manually handle their LODs to make sure it always looks right.

Some work was done by independents, and one or two OpenGL renderers done for Deus Ex as I recall. Not half bad, in one screen I have somewhere; you can probably still google it... IIRC there was a switch in the Registry that could turn TF on for any given game, but without extra work the results could look strange. RtCW used it mainly on the figure models, Unreal 2 multiplayer (XMP) could enable it (this is original, un-inited, from the U2SE):

[D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]
DetailTextures=True
HighDetailActors=True
SuperHighDetailActors=True
UsePrecaching=True
UseTrilinear=True
AdapterNumber=-1
ReduceMouseLag=True
UseTripleBuffering=False
UseHardwareTL=True
UseHardwareVS=True
UseCubemaps=True
DesiredRefreshRate=60
UseCompressedLightmaps=True
UseStencil=False
Use16bit=False
Use16bitTextures=False
MaxPixelShaderVersion=255
UseVSync=False
LevelOfAnisotropy=1
DetailTexMipBias=0.800000
DefaultTexMipBias=-0.500000
UseNPatches=False
TesselationFactor=1.000000
CheckForOverflow=False
DecompressTextures=False
UseXBoxFSAA=False

IIRC Tesselation Factor could be up to 2 or 3. I exchanged emails with tech support about disappointment TF wasn't in Campaign, which could've used it, and it was speculated Legend would patch that next. Sadly Legend was folded immediately after XMP's last patch. (Many ideas from the heavily vehicle-based XMP somehow found their way into UT2004 shortly afterwards... ) With Epic = TWIMTBP, hardware tesselation was never going to be added to UT3 PC, but considering sales, maybe it should've been. Wonder if it is on the tree-sitty.

If that wasn't enough (or was perhaps too much/geeky), Loyd Case writes about it readably at ExtremeTech.

While most of the attention at Nvision 2008 seemed to revolve around the LAN party, professional gaming tournaments, booth babes, and interesting games and applications, there was also a professional development conference going on.

Most of the action revolved around CUDA (compute unified device architecture), Nvidia's technology for using GPUs in massively parallel applications. However, Kev Gee of Microsoft showed up and gave a quick one-hour overview on Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 11—in particular, Direct3D.

Given the brief time, Gee had to compress a lot of information into an hour, but we came away with a better understanding of what DirectX 11 will bring to the table. In some ways, it's not as radical a change as DirectX 10 was. But it does introduce some important features. What follows is based on Kev Gee's talk at Nvision 2008. Since DirectX 11 is a work in progress, some of these bits of information could change before release.

DirectX 11: Sooner than You Think

...and on 8/15 Jason Cross wrote about

Highlights from SIGGRAPH 2008

The SIGGRAPH conference (yes it's an acronym, for Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques), an annual event put on by the ACM for those in the field of computer graphics. Back when it started in 1974, that was a pretty limited group. Today, it comprises of a huge field of CG and visual effects programmers, animators, modelers, researchers, hardware vendors, etc. It sounds like a non-stop display of awesome computer-generated graphics, right?

But SIGGRAPH is a professional conference, not geared toward the public or the end products they consume. If you're a professional artist looking forward to the latest features in ZBrush, or a professional/academic researcher that wants to see a presentation on research into how well people can pick out cloned characters in computer-generated crowds, this is your show.

akb825 wrote:

Bat wrote:

DirectX11 Overview at Elite Bastards

The tessellation also seems to be fairly interesting, but it seems like it will change the whole mesh creation process, since it deals with patches rather than triangles. Even though they talk about the "better multiplatform possibilities", both platforms being managed by Microsoft don't count.

Yah. I hadn't realized until recently that patches were the new primitives in this, actually replacing triangles. The hardware will cross platforms, the APIs etc will have to change a bit... but this is an MS-driven thing, begun on the 360, extended to PC via Winders, both DX. But as you point out, the transition will be made to other platforms with a bit of work. And backwards compatibility will be maintained, at least back to DX10.

Tho Metacell will probably be all upset for awhile...