Crysis 2 and it's use of Tessellation. It's not a driver problem

Tech Report has furnished an article explaining the amount of tessellation used in Crysis 2. In particular the use of underground highly tessellated water you cant see and one polygon per pixel use of tessellation on some flat surfaces like the jersey wall.

Video from a user.

 

So, in one scene are alot of tesselated objects, which I can't see?

 

The same conclusion was reported few weeks back by the French site "hardware.fr"
Here is the link from the English part of the web site:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/...ser-look-at-performance-and-tessellation.html

Nvidia helped to create that patch (if not done by their folks). So if you have a spiteful gossip you can say that nvidia make it this way because their tessellation engine is more powerful than AMD one...

Anyway, this is showing that Cryengine 3 was thought as a DX9 engine in first place... Cryengine 2 was at least DX10.
Is that the fault of consoles... this is still the same debate

 

"its"

 

deleted

 

"One potential answer is developer laziness..."

Ding-ding-ding-ding, we have a winner.

And the fail continues for Crysis2.

 

The biggest problem for me seeing the results from Tech Report is the amount of tessellation used but no increase in details.

Example, the tree log. The splintered end looks exactly the same as if there were no tessellation. Just the splintered ends were comprised of billions of polygons instead of just a few dozen it would take instead.

And for the tessellation of bricks, that could have been just done with POM.

I think this game would have looked just as good with DX10 and forget the DX11 tessellation.

Of course gotta love the tesellated water mesh on land where you can't see any water!

 

So the ending conclusion over all this from other sites that looked at it all, was that Crysis 2 wasn't overloading Radeon's tesselation engine, it was overloading the entire polygon bandwidth entirely due to a series of millions of un-needed polygons, along with developer laziness such as the water always being shown in scenes etc

That's just frankly sad, and I agree with the tech sites, why is the engine teselation going to such extreams? They pointed out objects that were completely flat, and still completely flat in DX11, but in DX11 mode where a flat surface only would be two polygon meshes, is suddenly half a million polygon meshes, with no rise in detail

I'm frankly disgusted with this, I mean, duh, the GTX 580 is more powerful, but the way Crytek did the DX11 patch is just outright to prove the GTX 580 is more powerful with tons and tons and tons of un-needed geometry calculations that do nothing to improve the games said visual quality

Least we know what ball is in what court when it comes to crytek

And I'm not saying that crytek can't make a game engine to be top of the line etc, or stress computer hardware, but come on, what point is there in teselating a -FLAT- surface?

 

I read that article and find it ridiculous that Crytek (and/or NVIDIA) would squander GPU resources rendering tessellation on water where you can't see it and on flat surfaces that don't benefit from it at all. It's just stupidly wasteful IMO.

I have a GTX 580 and the game runs at around 40-45 fps on average at 1920x1200 on Ultra settings but, from reading that article, I get the impression that it would run better at no noticeable loss of image quality if the tessellation was better utilised/optimised. Instead, it seems that Crytek/NVIDIA would rather I spent more money on their graphics cards instead on the assumption that my hardware isn't good enough to run the game faster on maximum settings. :bang:

 

word.

 

well, after the fact the game and gameplay got dumbed down for casual consoles lamers, the hack riddled multiplayer, lackluster bugfix, the DX11 and HD texture released months later, and yet again being a sell off to nvidia.

can we say Crytek has become a money whore and couldn't care less about the people who actualy play their games ?

hell, you can't even load or resume a game with their last patch and still not a single word from crytek in 2 months, but yet a group of pirate managed to fix it in a couple day in their crack.

this company has become a sad joke. uke2:

 

With 11.8 WHQL DirectX11 is still broken in Crysis 2. With High Res textures and everything on Ultra I get 60 fps with DirectX11 switched off. With Standard Textures, Advanced Graphics set to High and DirectX11 switched On, it's unplayable. I don't think this is ever going to be fixed by Crytek or ATI so I’m just going to finish the game without DirectX11, still looks great anyway. And I agree DirectX11 patch was designed for Nvidia users.

 

I'm no tech expert but isn't the water covered by the Z-Buffer so it's not even rendered? I don't know how the program works that is used for this article but I'd be surprised if Crytek really let this one slip (as its pretty basic rendering stuff)

 

On that subject, Crytek isn't alone being guilty of that. Lots of publishers/developers are taking the easy road and outsource it entirely to 3rd party.

 

that is why people with 5000 must use 2x in tesselation on CCC, and 6000 people use not more than 8x

 

That was my understanding too but the article seems to imply that there's still a performance hit from calculating the tessellated water even if it isn't actually rendered. Something like that anyway. But that still doesn't excuse the way those barriers and other 'flat' objects are pointlessly tessellated when the models, bar the 'caps' or whatever they're called on the top, are completely identical to the untessellated ones when fully rendered.

I'm all for having tessellation in games but only when it is obvious such as the human models in Deus Ex Human Revolution or the mountains in H.A.W.X. 2 for example. What's the point in using tessellation like in Crysis 2 when you cannot see it? :3eyes:

 

lol at that...you still believe that there is a serious difference between 5 and 6 series...??? it's not even twice as fast as they were shouting everywhere:banana:...so you should say 4x 5000 series 8x 6000 series...

the funny thing is to see hd7000 which is supposed to be 4x times stronger at hard tessellation than hd6000...

 

VLIV4 architecture (69xx cards) HAVE a stronger tesselation unit.
Take a look at e.g. Unigine benchmarks with tess on.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...899-amd-radeon-hd-6970-hd-6950-review-23.html

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...7286-amd-radeon-hd-6870-hd-6850-review-4.html

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/23

 

Aside from the 24hz bug I initially experienced with Crysis 2 DX11, after the release of 11.7, C2 never drops below 70 FPS for me. I'm running AMD GPU's and I have everything maxed out on Ultra @ 1080p. CCC Tess set at 64x also.