Right, but you had to turn it on and off to see the difference. Thats not part of the game.

Honestly its good, and stuff, but until its like Heaven Benchmark I don't see the point.

Maybe it's just me, but with the Unigine Heaven Benchmarch, I had to turn it on and off to really get a sense of what it was doing there.

No, you have to turn it on and off for it to jump out at you. The increase in detail on character models is significant - and that you don't notice it is the very point. Better models, without the performance hit.
It's just a tad short sighted to write off a new technology because it's only been used in limited fashions outside of tech demos.

It's all about how are you using that feature. Heaven uses it to vastly improve the polycount and the graphics' detail. CoP uses it (for what I've read) to improve performance. Tessellation can be used for both things, or a combination of both. That's what Phy is trying to tell you.



Depending of the Tessellation level you're using, it's terribly noticeable. Even more in wireframe mode.

Wireframe mode doesn't count. That makes it super obvious.

If you knew what tessellation was going into Heaven Benchmark, you would recognize what it was doing. I had to go out of my way to see the Tessellation in CoP.

When I first ran the benchmark, what I saw was beautiful. It wasn't until I turned it off, though, that I grasped just how much it was changing things.

Then search in YouTube some "Heaven tessellation On/Off comparison" to see the difference.

I don't need to. I download the benchmark myself and I run it on my own computer.

Do we even know for sure what Todd meant exactly? Does DX11 support mean that Skyrim will simply be able to run on DX11 graphics cards, or that Skyrim is able to support DX11 features through modders?

I thought the Heaven benchmark did a better job with tessellation than any game to date but they did have some issues in some places like the cobblestone ground was a bit much. Nothing a little height map tweaking can't fix.

well, he did say that he wasnt sure if they'll use all the benefits with dx11 because they wanted it to look roughly the same on all the platforms or something stupid like that... so I guess they mean that it is compatible with the features. atleast I hope

why wouldnt they take advantage for the dx11 is something i've been trying to figure out though :S why the hell not? it gives better performance AND visuals, why not use it? and the "look the same on all the platforms" just sounds like crap to me...

if you have a apple, a pineaple and a orange, and you can get out more juice from the pineaple, should you just press half the juice from the pineaple and let everything else go to waste? I dont think so...

I dream of eventually seeing a Skyrim mod where strong winds will send beautifully tessellated, waves crashing against the lake shores and coastlines. After all, if the game supports blowing branches and snow, I'd like to see the same effect in the water.

Maybe some time during the next generation. Thanks to Moore's Law, we know that the processors are still doubling up until 2015 to 2020, so that is into the next generation of games and with that much power, we could easily finally get to the point of Hyperrealism. Ah, I'm so glad I wasn't born in any other time period than now. So many glorious things are happening in this time in history, like being on the verge of immortality and most importantly, gaming! Well I'll stick immortality a little ahead of gaming but only a little :tongue:

But at least for now we have wind that affects your character and your character can be swept down stream by water. :tes:

I think there comes a point where the increased graphics capabilities may be a bad thing when it comes to game play. Too much of a game's budget will be eaten up just on the graphics, rather than focusing on game play. Final Fantasy XIII is the most obvious example of this. I like the game, but most of it really is just relatively narrow passages in comparison to the games of the SNES and PS1 in the series all of which feature plenty of exploration and non-linear area design.

What graphics card do you have?

Um, a 1.5 gb geforce gtx 480

This might have a possible sliver of truth if graphics developers were the ones also making the rest of the game, but they're not.
There's nothing special about modern hardware that lets you create linear experiences that are more pretty than nonlinear ones, that's always been possible, even back in the days of the NES or SNES. It was a design decision, and nothing else - that's all extra hardware does. Gives developers a wider range of choices. They're free to make any choice they wish - the developers of FFXIII have stated that the game was highly linear for story purposes, and that being able to do very fancy graphics was a side effect of that, not vice versa.

And, of course, if you had it running on better hardware you could have an open game with those graphics. No matter what your level of capability it will always be possible to push it to the limit, increased capabilities simply move that limit further back.

Like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU4vDIRcChE

Not to be off topic, but is anyone else finding the 1911 button to be amusing?

Of course it wouldn't be the same people, which is the point. You have to pay people to do work, and if graphics get better and better I fear an outrageous amount of the budget will have to be allocated to graphics rather than game design, which is just outright sad in my opinion.

You're paying your game designers anyway, are you going to ask them to come up with worse ideas so you can pay them less?
The argument doesn't hold water. The ability to prioritise graphics over gameplay is not a new thing, it's always been there. Indeed, getting more processing power will allow us to do more things on the fly, thus *reducing* the work necessary. Once, you had to hand craft your shadow maps. That was hard, and anybody who did it had to spend a long time. Then you could do it automatically, and bake it in, and then you could spend less time on it, but still had less room on your storage device than you would otherwise. Now we do it on the fly, asset and game designers don't worry about it, and the disc space isn't hurt. More processing power does *not* mean more work is neccesary to make use of it.