- Joined
- Dec 17, 2008
- Messages
- 1,482
The thing that makes tessellation so cool is that it's all hardware based. If you have a radeon 5xxx series and the Unigen Heaven benchmark, you can see tessellation in action at it's best. when you're in non-tessellated areas, CPU usage is very pronounced. However, once you get to an area that's heavily tessellated, the CPU usage drops dramatically compared to the number of triangles you're seeing on screen. That's because the CPU is only calculating triangles that are not tessellated on the hardware...
Ok, that doesn't make much sense, but it's real. It's a lot like hardware accelerated physics, in that it offloads the CPU to do other tasks. Try it, and you'll see what I mean.
Ok, that doesn't make much sense, but it's real. It's a lot like hardware accelerated physics, in that it offloads the CPU to do other tasks. Try it, and you'll see what I mean.
