Why are both techniques being used? POM has a nasty tendency to stick out in frame like a drag queen at mass - why even bother with it? If the places its being used are not 'noticeable' enough to warrant the added effort of proper tessellation meshes it would stand to reason that leaving the area in question as is should be fine. Will I be able to turn the POM off - or at least tweak the settings? It is kind of weird that something which was cool in 2006 is being pimped on a supposedly 'next gen' engine.

My guess its for those people who dont have DX11 cards.

The reason why POM is still used is because it's more performance efficient than tesselation

PoM only plays with lights and perspective to give you the illusion of height in the texture, however this effect does not make geometry, so around the edges it doesn't look really good

Tesselation takes the texture and makes real geometry out of it, looks better, interacts better with lighting, and even at some point it could even interact with physics

however, tesselation takes up way more resources than PoM if used extesively

in a game you can easily have 20+ PoM textures at the screen at any time as well as they can cover large distances, for instance in Crysis1, there was a giant lake, which was all made out of PoM rocks textures, with minor performance impact

however, if they are all tesselated all the rocks of the lake, they would cause a huge performance impact, since you would need to render over 3000 rocks at any time


my guess is that they're gonna use tesselation for NPC's, Bricks, enemies, while POM will be used for large scale things like dirt, sand, concrete roads,


and by the logic of "i doesn't matter if it takes more resources as long as it looks slighty better" then why not rendering every single brick on a huge building? it would look even better than tesselation

Well as the last guy said, tessellating the whole ground would be very resource hogging. And we can probably assume DX11 POM is improved over the DX9 method in some way.

Well as the last guy said, tessellating the whole ground would be very resource hogging. And we can probably assume DX11 POM is improved over the DX9 method in some way.

Its the other way acctually. Properly implemented DX11 tess features are FAR less resorce hungry than POM. If they properly Tessilated the entire gound it would be less of a hog than POM.

Well as the last guy said, tessellating the whole ground would be very resource hogging. And we can probably assume DX11 POM is improved over the DX9 method in some way.

Its the other way acctually. Properly implemented DX11 tess features are FAR less resorce hungry than POM. If they properly Tessilated the entire gound it would be less of a hog than POM.

Lolumad?

Because "properly implementing" 3-5X the polygon count will definitely be faster than a false shader based effect. Go into Crysis 1 and go to a rocky plane and type e_POM= 0 and then =1. Your frame rate wil drop by maybe 0.5 FPS tops with it on. It changes nothing. If the same area was tesselated you can bet your ass you would lose at least 10-15 FPS if not more.

You're getting it wrong. DX11 with implemented multithreaded and proper shaders with the same exact feature set as DX9 will be faster. Once you start adding stuff like tesselation and compute shader you can watch your performance tank.

Lol i thought POM adds real holes to the ground... when i played Crysis 1 and dirt road with trail.... it looks 3D... you know when its just a texture of bricks at one perspective it can look 3d but at other u can just see that its a picture of bricks... so the trail looks very real and bumpy or thats just 1 amazing illusion??? and those rocks you're mentioning... i can see that it has width and height... it doesn't look like some texture on the ground i move to the other side i see different side of the rock not just a texture.

@dzonibegood: You thought wrong. It's an illusion.

Indeed is it an optical illusion, like bump mapping but in the end it's just a texture not a real mesh with real depth. It's like Virtual Displacement Mapping used in the Unreal Engine 3, which make the bricks look real and have depth.

Well as the last guy said, tessellating the whole ground would be very resource hogging. And we can probably assume DX11 POM is improved over the DX9 method in some way.

Its the other way acctually. Properly implemented DX11 tess features are FAR less resorce hungry than POM. If they properly Tessilated the entire gound it would be less of a hog than POM.

Lolumad?

Because "properly implementing" 3-5X the polygon count will definitely be faster than a false shader based effect. Go into Crysis 1 and go to a rocky plane and type e_POM= 0 and then =1. Your frame rate wil drop by maybe 0.5 FPS tops with it on. It changes nothing. If the same area was tesselated you can bet your ass you would lose at least 10-15 FPS if not more.

You're getting it wrong. DX11 with implemented multithreaded and proper shaders with the same exact feature set as DX9 will be faster. Once you start adding stuff like tesselation and compute shader you can watch your performance tank.

BS, i just did that and got like a 25fps drop enabling POM (although im still getting WELL above 60FPS).

Its the other way acctually. Properly implemented DX11 tess features are FAR less resorce hungry than POM. If they properly Tessilated the entire gound it would be less of a hog than POM.

Lolumad?

Because "properly implementing" 3-5X the polygon count will definitely be faster than a false shader based effect. Go into Crysis 1 and go to a rocky plane and type e_POM= 0 and then =1. Your frame rate wil drop by maybe 0.5 FPS tops with it on. It changes nothing. If the same area was tesselated you can bet your ass you would lose at least 10-15 FPS if not more.

You're getting it wrong. DX11 with implemented multithreaded and proper shaders with the same exact feature set as DX9 will be faster. Once you start adding stuff like tesselation and compute shader you can watch your performance tank.

BS, i just did that and got like a 25fps drop enabling POM (although im still getting WELL above 60FPS).

Well that's a lie. My frame rate went from 36.7 to 36.4.

Well as the last guy said, tessellating the whole ground would be very resource hogging. And we can probably assume DX11 POM is improved over the DX9 method in some way.

Maybe they've implemented some kind of Directional-Based Parallax Occlusion Mapping. If the engine knows from what orientation you're viewing the texture, It can tone down the effect, so you don't get that trippy-ass texture warping when looking at POM-Enabled textures on the edge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Rm8P_F6Rk

Holy crap that is why ground textures look so **** in MWLL, now I know what to disable thanks!

Thats awesome. I want the whole game to look like that.

Holy crap that is why ground textures look so **** in MWLL, now I know what to disable thanks!

Yeah, I was stumped for a while, too, but then I realized I only got this artifact on the "3-D looking" textures. =P

Thats awesome. I want the whole game to look like that.

lol. Could you imagine if character models used this in its bugged state? =P