Why is Detail Tesselation not the same thing as ATI's TruForm?

[Murray]

I'm in no way implying anything. This is purely a question. Because I remember when I played Half-Life 1 with TruForm turned on, it made all the boxes look like baloons as if they were gonna explode. How is this any different from Detail Tesselation?

 

[Asus]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "Detail Tesselation" but here is an article on DX11 hardware tessellation.
"Gee went on to explain that DX11 tessellation was more robust and general than the solution built into current AMD GPUs. The AMD hardware uses essentially the same as the tessellation unit in the Xbox 360; DX11 tessellation is a superset of the AMD approach."
It's based on but not compatible with Truform.

 

[Murray]

I guess I should have started off by linking to this Youtube link to give you an idea of what I was reffering to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wp4Y-u8-Qw

But yeah, you're right. I was reffering to Hardware Tesselation. Not sure why I got those words mixed up.

EDIT: Oh yeah, he says "Detail Tesselaion" all the time in the video.

 

[Murray]

I suppose that's all the info I'm gonna get.

Yes, I bumped my own thread. I feel ashamed.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Well it's hard to say as I haven't programmed DX11, but essentially they seem to be the same sort of techniques of doing just triangle tessalation to increase performance.

What may be one difference is that this is an actual part of the DX standard now, and not just one company trying to implement it.

Second, it's possible that TruForm and the new dx11 standard have different methods of tessalation that maybe works better than previously.

Third, GPU's back in the day just didn't have the triangle pushing power to make this feature extremely compelling. Then this magical thing called bump maps came out and that changed the industry. Put yourself back in game dev shoes when TruForm was around. You could have added support for a limited technology by one card manufacturer that increases the number of triangles you have to draw dramatically (and it still wouldn't get a good image), or instead do basic bump mapping, keep the same amount of triangles and get a better image.

Those are just my guesses, but it just seems that the time just wasn't right for TruForm back in the day, but now it's being added as a standard, ATI is right there again, obviously. Tesselation is really nothing totally unique, so the fact that ATI tried implementing this years ago isn't a shock. It was just too hard to gain support most likely, which is why it was cut.

 

[Murray]

words

Ah, I guess that in theory it's basically the same thing then, just programmed in a different way.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Ah, I guess that in theory it's basically the same thing then, just programmed in a different way.

bscly