I have recently checked out the crysis 2 DX11 patch and I must say that tesselation just doesn't do it for me at this point. In my opinion the framerate drops too much in relation to the visual impact. Only the fastest cards out there and dual GPU setups make this amount of tesselation playable. I own a modded 6950 running at 6970 speeds (not a bad card is it?) and an I5 2500K @ stock and I must conclude that it's not enough to play through the game without the framerate annoying me. Messing with resolution helps but the visual impact thereof is more important to me than being able to see actual depth in a wall texture when I stand really close to it. Turning off tesselation in CCC makes the game playable again. Perhaps the 11.8 drivers will improve things in the future but for now I'm leaving tesselation off. The second part of my point is that there are perfectly suitable techniques out there. Parrallax Occlusion Mapping impressed me immensely from the moment I saw it in Crysis 1, and it manages to impress again in Crysis 2. Particularly given the limited FPS impact.
Don't get me wrong I do think tesselation is the future and it is very nice that Crytek brings out this patch and pushes the limits of PC gaming. It's just that at this point in time tesselation is just not worth the FPS impact imo. I would much rather have displacement mappnig and more open and destructible environments (I know console limitations warning... grrr I hate consoles) in the game. I remember blowing up those huts in Crysis 1 time after time. And I loved that mass barrel explosion video on youtube. So please bring back mass physics Crytek, pretty f#ck#ng please...