» Fri Sep 21, 2012 11:13 am
I used it to check it out. It was stupid because manually scaling the tesellation factor down would result in corrupted and jagged tesellation. I've seen this happen ONLY in Crysis. The whole point of tessellation is that it is scalable, for christ's sake!
Also the ocean is always present in the engine (even if you can't see it) which means you are constantly tesellating a massive water body with a tessellation factor of x64. This is USELESS and mind-bogglingly stupid.
They also used tesellation idioticly in a lot of places where Parallax Occlusion Mapping would've done a much better job due to having a dramatically lower performance impact. In particular, huge walls and pretty much every single ground/floor should have been POM, and yet it was sometimes POM, sometimes x64 tesellation.
They went so far as to switch from POM to Tess and vice-versa with no criteria whatsoever in the EXACT SAME material/surface type/object multiple times per level (Sometimes you'd see a wall with POM, then some minutes later you'd come across the exact same type of wall in a different place, using POM with much lower performance impact and nearly the same visual quality). I mean, who's stupid enough to do that?
... Oh yeah. Crytek.