» Wed Mar 30, 2011 10:58 am
No.
Firstly, there are already several open topics about this.
Secondly, no matter what certain people have claimed to know (in closed-by-now threads) on here about tessellation being possible in Skyrim via the modding tools, etc... they are flagrantly incorrect and only adding to the confusion and causing more topics like this.
Todd said that Skyrim will "support" DX11, while using none of the DX11 features. This is essentially meaningless. I'll temporarily ignore his further statements where he explicitly says that the game is based on a DX9 feature set... which is already a dead giveaway and we could otherwise stop the discussion here.
Basically, if you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7 you are already running DX11. Regardless of what card you have. The runtime version is in fact DirectX 11. What "supporting" DirectX11 (but none of the features) means is that the game will work just fine with the DirectX 11 runtime. Todd probably also meant to convey that the game certainly won't be gimped on DX11 hardware, and will make full use of the graphics power.
Now... When you start talking about using/supporting DX11-level features, you immediately require the graphics hardware capable of running those features... with some exceptions. For one, if they forego Windows XP support, they can actually have ONE executable file, and with the DirectX 11 runtime enact what are called "feature levels"... Then one EXE file can support DirectX 9-level and above GPUs without any fuss. The issue is, Windows XP will never have the DirectX 11 runtime, and they're not likely to drop XP support at this point. Generally, game makers aren't yet ready to drop Windows XP support and usually go with multiple DX9/DX11 files.
Since they've already stated they're using none of the DX11 features, you can immediately deduce several things:
1. There will be no need for and thus not be a DX11 executable.
2. They will not be requiring DX11 hardware.
3. The Creation Kit will not have any kind of tessellation options, as there is no DX11 executable.
4. Any tessellation support will have to come in the form of a patch which adds a DX11 executable.
Even if there WERE a DX11 executable, tessellation won't be an option until they actually write it into the EXE source, as well as create all the necessary tessellation shaders. The art pipeline also has to support tessellation from the get-go. Unless they simply add in PN Triangle or Phong tessellation at a later date, which is the smoothing of organic models, ala TruForm circa 2001.
And for all the people claiming tessellation is something you can "just turn on", please study the topic on a code/shader/hardware level and reassess those views. Even the art-less PN Triangle tessellation needs to be written into the engine code by people... the hardware doesn't automatically tessellate everything itself. Today's tessellation isn't like ATI's TruForm.
Lastly, if the art pipeline from Oblivion is any indication of Skyrim's art pipeline, it is suboptimal for tessellation anyway. They don't use height maps (though the information is still there in normal maps), and their UV mapping style is basically incompatible with tessellation. UV islands are an efficient use of space, but have many seams and usually only contain half of a mesh... as most meshes are symmetric on at least one axis. Tessellation doesn't work with UV islands whatsoever. The texture maps need to have basically one seam, and unwrap over the whole mesh. UV seams also lead to holes and other artifacts with tessellation, as the vertices tend to go away from each other at the seam.
And as a sidenote... As for "Extender" projects, we stopped understanding Bethesda's engines with Fallout 3... Oblivion Graphics Extender is essentially limited to doing things in screenspace, as post-effect shaders. Hacking in tessellation would most likely never happen in a "Skyrim Graphics Extender", especially if they only ever give us a DX9 exe.