Crysis 2 Tessellation Article

[WMD]

Have this been posted before?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYL07c74Jr4

Demonstrates very well all the worthless tessellation they add. It looks even worse than that Techreport article!

@0:54 extreme tessellation on a pile of dirt under a lamp post but the curved lamp post and spherical lamp are not tessellated and looks bad. @ 1:13 The pile of dirt itself do not scale tessellation factor smoothly with distance and appears to have only 2 LOD. Non tessellated and extreme tessellation.

@1:47 tessellation on wooden planks barricading a door. It does not seem to scale back smoothly with distance.

@2:23 tessellated crater beneath an alien structure. @3:02 you can see the shape of this object is still jagged and angular despite the millions of polygons. Looks like they simply divided the simple base mesh triangles into smaller triangles without any worthwhile displacement mapping.

@ tessellated walls tiles though the tiles themselves are mostly large and flat and wont look any different from simply being textured.

@ 4:51 more flat wall tessellated. Here the fps drops to 20s while staring at nothing but walls. A large cylindrical pipe near the floor appears to be a good candidate for tessellation but it appears untessellated.

 

[Silverforce11]

It's all lies. NV would never deliberately cripple games on it's competitor's hardware.

Must all be pure random chance, devs making useless tessellation to the max just for fun, especially so they could delay the game release and then make a dx11 patch afterwards.

 

[notty22]

Subtle image improvements and its worth compared to FPS hit is always debateable. There are many scenes/areas of Crysis 2 with the dx11 patch that are awesome.

AMD showed off pictures of rocks in dirt 2 as its contribution to justify dx11 and its 30% performance hit.

Are those rocks, the flag that AMD supplied as dx11 improvements , worthy, or worthless ?

 

[SirPauly]

It's all lies. NV would never deliberately cripple games on it's competitor's hardware.

Must all be pure random chance, devs making useless tessellation to the max just for fun, especially so they could delay the game release and then make a dx11 patch afterwards.

Obviously, the sales and perception of selling GPU's are important to you. I'm just glad to see future forward features and sure, more ideal tessellation where it would make sense would be welcomed but the DirectX 11 path offers more image quality and immersion over-all but if it isn't your cup of tea, one has the choice of DirectX 9.

Some points here are fair game but you're asking people to believe that all these professional developers are in on it; to try to cripple AMD on purpose.

 

[WMD]

Subtle image improvements and its worth compared to FPS hit is always debateable. There are many scenes/areas of Crysis 2 with the dx11 patch that are awesome.

AMD showed off pictures of rocks in dirt 2 as its contribution to justify dx11 and its 30% performance hit.

Are those rocks, the flag that AMD supplied as dx11 improvements , worthy, or worthless ?

The ambient occlusion (rocks) is worthy. The flag is not usually noticed in game. Dirt 2 in DX11 is quite acceptable as it did not take a nearly as big performance hit as in crysis 2. Most of current gpus easily maintains well over 30fps. However it is worth pointing out while Dirt 2 does not intentionally cripple a certain brand of cards. It is somewhat disingenuous in its own ways. Ambient occlusion have been used in crysis DX9 before Dirt2 and Dx11. The tessellation on the flag is noticeable only because the original model is so horribly low polygon. Sharper as opposed to blurry is also in no way a DX11 exclusive feature. I am still playing the game. Great graphics but frustrated DX11 only works in 60Hz.

 

[Outrage]

AMD showed off pictures of rocks in dirt 2 as its contribution to justify dx11 and its 30% performance hit.

Are those rocks, the flag that AMD supplied as dx11 improvements , worthy, or worthless ?

you forgot:
Tessellated water (that aint rendered over the whole map)
instanced tessellated crowd
lightning, post processing.

If you think that the ambient occlusion on those rocks puts a 30% performance hit on the cards, well i dont know what to say.

Dirt is a 2 year old game, and since we are talking tessellation in this thread, compare 2 more recent games, deus ex and crysis 2 who did the tessellation best?

 

[SirPauly]

You really believe that DirectX 11 Deus Ex offers more graphic prowess than Crysis 2?

I'm just glad that both IHV's are trying to garner their strengths and tried to improve immersion over the DirectX 9 path. I'm not looking for idealism but looking for good things. There is a lot of good in that Crysis 2 DirectX 11 patch.

I can just imagine some mind-sets think this:

Look Dude, look at that -- there is too much tessellation -- those sneaky, evil nVidians paying off developers just to make my choice look bad. But, they're not going to fool me --- I'm on it. Take away this and it is obvious that AMD, my choice, is superior. nVidia is all about marketing and offering critical hits to my choice and make their hardware seem superior. Those nVidia splash screens just bother me and nVidia on the box -- WTF?

Don't get me started on proprietary -- all about control I tell ya. Just look at the AA in Batman, PhysX, 3d vision and Cuda. Tired of their division and destroying the PC gaming I love. If only more companies thought like ATI -- Oh, I mean AMD now.

 

[Outrage]

You really believe that DirectX 11 Deus Ex offers more graphic prowess than Crysis 2?

Take a look at the topic of this thread "Tessellation", you even thinking that someone thinks deus ex looks better overall then crysis 2, well.

Crossing checkboxes when implementing something is more importent than doing it right, i dont get the thinking behind that, except for marketing reasons, it sure dont evolve gaming in the right way for consumers.

 

[96Firebird]

AMD comes out with first DX11 cards, praises tessellation and DX11 capabilities.

Nvidia comes out with Fermi, which spanks AMD cards in tessellation.

Now tessellation is BAD!

I don't know why tessellation is used the way it is in Crysis 2, but I find it funny how people are so quick to blame Nvidia. Like any of you really know what goes on behind closed doors, and who makes decisions like this.

 

[Outrage]

Now tessellation is BAD!

give me a quote from someone saying that......

 

[SirPauly]

@ Outrage.

I guess your answer is no!

I don't think the tessellation in Crysis 2 is a check box feature -- there are areas that it really does enhance noticeably. There is also oddness to some of their decision making, where there didn't seem to be much care where to place the tessellation. I'm open minded for asking questions to nVidia and Crytech but not blanketing conspiracy conjecture and pass it off as factual.

 

[96Firebird]

give me a quote from someone saying that......

Thats how I interpret some of the posts here.

Of course, they will say that they want "acceptable" levels of tessellation. Who is to say what "accepetable" is? Is acceptable no tessellation? Perhaps to some it is. It is a relative term.

Tessellation is still young, maybe the developers don't know how to implement it yet. What goes into developing a tessellated object? Is it automatic? Do you just design the object, highlight it, and click tessellate?

 

[at80eighty]

Have this been posted before?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYL07c74Jr4

Demonstrates very well all the worthless tessellation they add. It looks even worse than that Techreport article!

wow. what a crappy way to go about things. I would love to hear Crytek's logic behind that

 

[Red Hawk]

You really believe that DirectX 11 Deus Ex offers more graphic prowess than Crysis 2?

...no. It's just that AMD/Eidos was not as idiotic or anticompetitive with its implementation of tessellation in Deus Ex as Nvidia/Crytek was in Crysis 2.

 

[SirPauly]

If I used your logic and thinking, what they did was worse by locking the Stereo3d implementation to just AMD GPU's for DirectX 11 for Deus Ex. Hey finger pointing, blaming and using speculative, conspiracy conjecture is fun! But not really though!

 

[Red Hawk]

Both companies have proprietary technologies, and that's another topic. Tessellation isn't one of them. Crippling a competitor's hardware and harming your own with a tessellation load that has little or in some places literally no benefit is either idiotic or anticompetitive.

 

[96Firebird]

Where is the proof that Nvidia tessellated the objects in Crysis 2?

 

[Red Hawk]

It's a TWIMTBP title, which means Nvidia had a large hand in "helping" Crytek implement DirectX 11 and other graphical features.

 

[badb0y]

I think Crytek is the one to blame here, not nVidia...

I am all for advancing graphics but do it in a sensible manner, don't just throw crap out and expect everyone to like it.

 

[amenx]

I don't know why tessellation is used the way it is in Crysis 2, but I find it funny how people are so quick to blame Nvidia. Like any of you really know what goes on behind closed doors, and who makes decisions like this.

Exactly. Who has the final say on the released package, Crytek or Nvidia? If the former, does it mean they were completely in the dark as to any alleged 'performance cripling'? We know Crytek was in a big rush to get the game out and the subsequent DX11 package. Is it not possible they simply cut corners, and as long as it played 'sufficiently well', that was enough for them? Crysis 2 with DX11 is still far easier on hardware than Crysis 1 with DX10. Still, if indeed there was major lapse on their part, can it not be corrected with a future patch? And cull the unnecessary rendering of the hidden tess parts? I would think that if they saw this as 'big enough' thing to respond to, they will address it in due time, probably in the form of another patch.

 

[Genx87]

What I find funny or sad depending on how one looks at it. The people whining about too much tessellation wont give a rats about too much when AMD catches upto Nvidia on tessellation performance. Possibly with their next gen cards that are going with a scaleable tesselator

 

[SirPauly]

Both companies have proprietary technologies, and that's another topic. Tessellation isn't one of them. Crippling a competitor's hardware and harming your own with a tessellation load that has little or in some places literally no benefit is either idiotic or anticompetitive.

Considering this isn't the end-all-be-all for the PC version of Crysis 2, one can certainly make the case of more efficiency when using tessellation and where to place it. My beef is the judges and executioners based on circumstantial data -- so quick for a verdict.

There is little doubt in my mind that nVidia didn't desire to show differences in tessellation performance --why wouldn't they based on their architecture? There is nothing wrong with this thinking and why not try to offer more quality for your customer base? And if your competitors can't handle the settings, they can turn settings down. That's fair game to me, sorry!

The key is not the amount of tessellation used but where the developers added the tessellation. Would need to talk to the developers and need more data.

 

[96Firebird]

We know Crytek was in a big rush to get the game out and the subsequent DX11 package. Is it not possible they simply cut corners, and as long as it played 'sufficiently well', that was enough for them?

Something to keep in mind. Crytek didn't release Crysis 2 with DX11, and this caused an uproar within the PC gaming community. I'm betting they didn't care which items were tessellated, or how well they were tessellated, or the performance hit it took on today's hardware. They just wanted to get the DX11 patch out ASAP, and did a half-assed job.

 

[Grooveriding]

Whether you're a raging nvidia fanboy or not you should be upset over the worthless tessellation and needless performance hit in this game.

The game does not look as good as the original Crysis & Warhead and runs worse ? That is a pretty poor showing in of its self. I have no idea how the game performs at 1920x1080, but going on my system and not being able to get a steady 60fps throughout, I'm going to assume you need 580 SLI to run this at that resolution with no slowdowns.

Pretty sad considering a single 580 can run Crysis & Warhead at that resolution with ease. But lap it up.

This game pretty much put the nail in Crytek's coffin on the PC platform. Sadly there is nothing on the horizon that looks to be the next Crysis anytime soon. BF3 alpha looked pretty but its no Crysis either.

If you game at 1920x1080 or less and you don't care about playing Crysis 2 I have no idea what you are going to get out of upgrading anymore with the sorry state of PC visuals not being pushed.

 

[SirPauly]

Some get upset easier than others. Having only a DirectX 9 path would of been much worse, one may imagine.