Here's a hopeful tidbit I found. I don't know if they mean for Skyrim or a future game, but it sounds promising.
http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-features/55462-skyrim-mods-could-run-on-consoles
"But the specifics DX11 does, like tessellation and all that kinda stuff, we aren't taking advantage of that right now. That doesn't mean we won't in the future. We aren't right now because we want to author it so it looks great,"

I think they mean the next TES game... or Fallout game.

I don't know how they could add this into Skyrim later...

Skyrim already has DX11 support, all they need to do is release a patch.

I don't think they can just fit it into a single patch...

That's not how it works... BGS would have to completely rebuild Skyrim with DX11. Adding in tessellation isn't as simple as flipping a light switch. The game has to be built with the technology in mind from the beginning, and Skyrim is built for DX9. Todd is specifically talking about taking full advantage of DX11 capabilities for the next generation (likely the next Fallout game and future TES titles). The best us PC gamers with DX11 cards can hope for is slight improvements and upgrades in the game. Don't expect anything mind-blowing (considering what DX11 is capable of) as Skyrim was never built for that.

PCs don't have size limitations, unlike XBL and PSN.

Sure, if they were going for super-detailed models, but they can release a simple patch to add tessellation to existing models to smooth out the rough edges.

Download bandwidth does however.

Well BGS always releases a high resolution texture pack anyway for PC. Tessellation would just substantially increase polygon count on structures near the player to make them look fantastic and extremely detailed.

I'm pretty sure he was referring to having it supported in future games not skyrim. Can't really say for certain whether it would even be possible but I hope so, anything that makes it look better is a plus.

Why? It's code, it doesn't require preset meshes so it's not like they are going to be massive patches to implement DX11.

Wouldn't the meshes have to be made specifically in mind with tesselation for that to work? Or something like that?

Sounds unlikely that you can just say 'tesselation on!' and stuff magically starts looking better without any other effort.

The models are already made, tessellation would just smooth the models, which is what we really want.

You need high levels of magika and a character lvl 60 at least! to be able to cast Tesselation lvl 1! :read:

On the tesselations demos i have the meshes indeed have like a net wich bumps/warps the texture so yes i believe the meshes need to be updated :turtle:

Tessellation does not require set meshes, that's what tessellation is good for is generating extra geometry to an object but it require a guide, which is just code that tells what dimensions the tessellation should stick to. You can add tessellation to any premade mesh, you just need to make sure to set the parameters.

you must be from canada....eh der.

im american so sometimes i download huge multi GB random unnecessary files over night just so that i can delete them the next day without even using them.

That's unfortunate waste of electricity and public bandwidth :bonk:

have you seen the patch sizes for gt5 - massive. pathc size makes no difference

sometimes i run the dishwasher twice just to make sure that the dishes are extra sparkly.

Nah, I doubt it. I don't think Beth's going to release tessellation in a patch, especially since it would just be for the pc. After they finish Skryim, they'll have part of the team work on dlc/expansions while the rest begins to move onto the next project. I suspect we won't see any major official graphics change for Skyrim, but this is promising for future games in the series. Definitely something to look forward to for TES: VI :biggrin:

Wow how people know nothing;

It's not really that simple. D3D10/11 allow MUCH more to be done in hardware than D3D9 - granted, the gap isn't as big as going from fixed-function only to programmable shaders, but it's still huge. Comparing screenshots of D3D9/D3D10 in one game doesn't tell you anything except how much effort they put into the D3D10 renderer for that title - and there's the rub, because due to three factors (non-backwards compatible with hardware, requires Vista/Win7, console generation still frozen at DirectX 8.5 feature levels) adaptation of the new tech has been extremely slow.
I have yet to a see a single game where the 'DirectX 11' mode wasn't essentially a port of the DirectX 9 renderer with some very slightly improved shaders. Games won't really start taking advantage of the new hardware until their renderers are designed from the ground up with the D3D10 feature set as a minimum requirement.
So yes, there tends to be very little difference going from D3D9 to D3D10 from the gamer's point of view; this doesn't mean that there isn't a huge potential difference offered by the improved API and hardware features. It's just not being exploited, because there isn't really a lot of money in making a game that can only be played by PC's, hell not even high end PC's with you average PC it's incredibly cheap to buy a dx11 card.

TLDR: Games have to be designed from the ground with DX10.1/11 in mind, but you have consoles that are stuck at dx8.5 api technology.


Now the best bet is if BGS adds it in the code of the game but doesn't implement it and instead allows modders to implement said features. Hopefully they do this.

Also the only real DX11 game you can possibly get your hands on is BF3 there is nothing else that is true DX10.1/11

Nope I bet Beth is going to allow the Mod Community to work that into the PC version of the game so that they don't have to do it or they don't have the time to do it.

By consoles, are you referring to both? I was told the PS3 doesn't use DX technology, at all.

True it uses OpenGL but the version of OpenGL they use is also old. The current opengl 4.1 can pretty much do everything DX11 can as well. I think it uses OpenGL ES 2.0 (short for Embedded System) which is a subset of OpenGL 2.0.

So yeah pretty much referring to both console systems, and until developers start leading with the PC again and scaling down then porting over we will not see to many improvements. Since crysis 1 nothing has really gone anywhere, theres metro 2033 but thats it (it uses light amounts of tessellation and some other dx11 effects). The only developer that is currently doing this is Dice with BF3, but i think the game may jade console gamers because they may think they are getting a bad deal. In reality they aren't it's simply there systems cannot handle the things the PC version is doing, it comes down to why should the slow limit the fast, the weak hold back the strong ect and so on.

Partially. You do and you don't. For one you need a height map, unless you're only using the old "TruForm"-style tessellation that ATI pioneered so many years ago. This is useful for smoothing organic meshes and needs no artist input. Modern day equivalents are PN Triangle or Phong tessellation.

Artist input may also not be needed if you already use bump or normal maps for all game assets. You could then convert the bump or normal map to a height map (basically no change actually as they all contain similar information regarding surface height) for use in tessellation. Then you can use the normal mapping for higher frequency detail like fine bumps, or a general noise to make the surface look even rougher.

The issues with this kind of tessellation are many-fold, however. You may run into artifacts such as holes and things, clashing vertices and so forth. This happens if the artist pipeline isn't already set up to support tessellation with proper meshes and height map generation. You generally want to, say, sculpt the higher detailed mesh in Zbrush, create a lower poly mesh, and then bake a height map from the higher detailed version. For non-organic (hard surface) modeling especially, you seem to need very specific meshes going into the tessellation process... That is, depending on the kind of detail being added. But usually you run into issues if your hard surfaces aren't gridded properly. Basically, you *can* add tessellation to existing meshes but it may not be the prettiest.

There is also the notion of "density maps" in tessellation which would require an entirely different map to be created, telling the tessellation shader where the most important detail is and thus where to focus its efforts. Tessellation after all does act as a continuous LOD system, and thus you should be telling the GPU to not bother creating thousands of polys on flat surfaces. This step is not required for tessellation, but the results without it would be next to useless for a realtime game. Without it the tessellation is too even and will focus on tessellating all the wrong areas, stripping the more crucial mesh areas of detail at the same time.


You may be thinking of [PN Triangle or Phong]-type tessellation, in which case I agree with you. But you may also think that generally tessellation always "smooths" the models when it is usually useful for the opposite. The most apparent uses of tessellation are for adding tons of detail to things which I think result in a rougher look. Of course you could also just mean "higher poly" but that doesn't equate to looking better unless the tessellation shader is told how to interpolate the added geometry between the control vertices. That is where stuff like PN Triangle tessellation comes in handy.


See stuff above. Generally I don't understand any of your jargon... I've studied tessellation on a code and hardware level and I don't quite know what you're saying. I think the vague gist is that you think tessellation can just be added to any mesh, and you just need to write the shaders for it. This may be technically true, but means nothing if proper height data wasn't made specifically for the mesh in question, and even then if the mesh was not made with tessellation in mind you WILL run into artifacts if either the height map data is fairly complicated or the topology of your mesh is fairly complicated.

For one, if Oblivion's art pipeline is any indication... Just slapping on tessellation to Skyrim could be impossible to ugly to disastrous in scope. They use UV islands which aren't even compatible with tessellation, and even if they were would likely lead to gaping holes at every seam. Also, the UV islands usually only contain one half of a mesh, and are mirrored on at least one axis because most models are symmetrical on at least one axis. You must use more artist-friendly texture maps, where there is one UV seam and the texture wraps around the entire mesh. Even with one UV seam there can be holes or artifacts. Other than that the only things that could be tessellated "after the fact" would be terrain, walls, and some architecture... models that generally don't use UV islands, and have no complex UV mapping/wrapping/unwrapping. Usually models where the entire square texture is used for the map would be good candidates. Most everything else would be inherently incompatible with tessellation. Again, I'm talking about art pipelines that aren't made beforehand with tessellation in mind. We already have statements from Todd that tessellation is not in the PC version. Coupled with the fact that PC sales are a small minority of sales, it's likely the assets and the art pipeline are in formats beneficial to consoles. UV islands are an efficient use of space, and have a much higher amount of detail per filesize. The artist- and tessellation- friendly UV layouts are wasteful in comparison as half, 2/3 or 3/4 of the data can be redundant depending on the model's axes of symmetry. Meaning if they had to choose between tessellation-friendly assets or fitting more assets on an Xbox DVD, I would assume they'd still choose the latter.

Really, the only tessellation that can just casually be added to any pre-existing mesh are the "TruForm" types... and you can't use those on meshes which need to retain hard-edge detail... unless of course they're made ala Pixar's Sub-D rendering where they employ different tricks to retain hard edges like multiple edge loops, edge densities, etc.

....

@ the OP:

"In the future" doesn't likely apply to Skyrim's lifespan as already pointed out, and thus the topic title (and topic itself) are a little misleading. This compounded with certain people stating elsewhere (most likely in long-closed threads) that just because Skyrim "supports" DX11, modders will somehow have access to tessellation leads to false hope.