Came across this on another board.

Source(French):
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/838-6/tessellation-loupe.html

Brief summary:

Aside from the few excessively tessellated objects, there's one very odd design "feature" -- the entire water surface from the harbor is extended well beyond the shore inland beneath the city. Although not rendered, the tessellation workload for all this wasted geometry still has to be performed, and as expected the Radeons are much more sweated by this extra load:

Just what I just wrote in another thread... tessellation almost inexistent, the most visible and POM, but not need DX11 for POM!

Crysis 1 had a POM and DX9...

Just what I just wrote in another thread... tessellation almost inexistent

Where did you see 'tessellation almost inexistent' in that post. There's lots of tessellation in the game but in some cases tessellation is not the best technique. POM also gives extra depth at less cost and can be done in DX9 but as I have a DX11 card I don't care.

Just what I just wrote in another thread... tessellation almost inexistent

Where did you see 'tessellation almost inexistent' in that post. There's lots of tessellation in the game but in some cases tessellation is not the best technique. POM also gives extra depth at less cost and can be done in DX9 but as I have a DX11 card I don't care.

In french : Pour rappel, la plupart des sentiers profitent non pas de la tessellation mais du Parallax Occlusion Mapping, y compris pour les pavés ou pour les briques qui les composent.

English: Remember, most of the trails not benefit from the tessellation, but the Parallax Occlusion Mapping, including the paving stones or bricks that compose them.

In french : Ceci étant dit, sur notre scène de test, en dehors de la première seconde sur laquelle nous pouvons apercevoir quelques briques tessellées, il n'y a ni mur, ni pierre, ni eau ni autre objet qui semble être candidat à la tessellation. Et pourtant, nous avons observé un impact important lié à cette technique de rendu. Pour en savoir plus, nous avons fait appel à GPU Perf Studio, l'outil d'anolyse d'AMD qui permet de se plonger dans la construction du rendu graphique.

English: That said, our test scene, apart from the first second on which we can see some bricks tessellées, there is no wall, no stone, no water or other object that appears to be a candidate for the tessellation. Yet, we observed a significant impact related to this rendering technique. To learn more, we have used GPU Perf Studio, the anolysis tool that allows AMD to immerse themselves in the construction of the graphics rendering.

I speak french dude ! And you ?

PS: To summarize the tesselation exists in the game but it is almost never visible to the eye, but it consumes many resources!!! hahaha, Good job Crytek ! you are too much!

That's true, but can't be avoided. to have water in a CryENGINE based game it has to be set at a certain "level". You either have water or you don't. You can't get rid of the invisible water under all of the buildings.

I don't think it's actually rendering all the time though. Crytek probably used occluders to prevent the underlying water from being rendered.

It's still being tesselated and as far as I know you can make holes in the water that should prevent this sort of thing. They only used that for areas going below water before but now it would serve as an optimisation.