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1. #VIDEO GAME TESSELLATION ART UPDATE#
2. #VIDEO GAME TESSELLATION ART ARCHIVE#
3. #VIDEO GAME TESSELLATION ART FULL#
4. #VIDEO GAME TESSELLATION ART PC#

The work needed to construct each frame can be broken down by individual draw calls to the DirectX 11 3D API, and a visual timeline across the bottom of the screen shows which of those draw calls are taking longest to complete. GPU PerfStudio is a freely available tool for Radeon graphics cards, and its integrated debugger can analyze individual frames in a game to see where GPU time is going. (English translation here.) We won’t duplicate all of his hard work, but we do want to take a look at one aspect of it: a breakdown of Crysis 2‘s use of tessellation using a developer tool from AMD called GPU PerfStudio.

#VIDEO GAME TESSELLATION ART UPDATE#

A busy summer has kept us from spending as much time with the DX11 update as we’d like, but we saw some intriuging things in Damien Triolet’s coverage (in French) over at. With its DX11 update, Crysis 2 had the potential to be one of the first games to offer truly appreciable increases in image quality via tessellation. That’s true in part because of the aforementioned scourge of console-itis (though the Xbox 360 does have limited tessellation hardware) and in part because game developers must create higher-detail versions of their underlying 3D models in order to insert them into games-not exactly a cost-free proposition. Unfortunately, we have so far seen few examples of tessellation used well in a video game. Such dynamic algorithms can maintain the illusion of complexity without overburdening the GPU’s geometry processing capacity. One of the major benefits of DX11’s tessellation capability is its dynamic and programmable nature: the game developer can ramp up the polygon detail only where needed, and he can scale back the number of polygons in places where they wouldn’t be perceived-say, in the interior of objects compromised of flat surfaces or in objects situated further from the camera. Used well, tessellation promises to improve the look of real-time graphics in some pleasant and impactful ways, eliminating-at long last-the pointy heads on so many in-game characters and giving difficult-to-render objects like trees much more organic external structures. Tessellation allows the GPU to employ its vast computing power to transform the low-polygon models used in most games into much higher-detail representations, with a relatively minimal performance cost. The highest profile of those features is probably tessellation, which seems to be the signature new capability of DX11 in the minds of many. The features list includes a host of techniques that represent the cutting edge in real-time graphics, including objects tessellated via displacement mapping, dynamically simulated and tessellated water, parallax occlusion mapping (where tessellation isn’t the best fit), shadows edges with variable softness, a variant of screen-space ambient occlusion that takes the direction of light into account, and real-time reflections.

With the DX11 update installed, Crysis 2 becomes one of the most visually striking and technically advanced video games in the world.

#VIDEO GAME TESSELLATION ART PC#

An awful lot of time had passed since the game’s release back in March, but the size and scope of the update sure felt like a good-faith effort at making things up to PC gamers.

#VIDEO GAME TESSELLATION ART ARCHIVE#

Then, in late June, Crytek and publisher EA unloaded a massive, PC-specific update to Crysis 2 in three parts: a patch to version 1.9 of the game weighing in at 136MB, a 545MB patch adding DirectX 11 support, and a hulking 1.65GB archive containing high-res textures for the game. Months passed, and rumors about a possible DirectX 11 update for the game rose and fell like the tide, with little official word from Crytek. Instead, the game became known as another sad example of a dumbed-down console port.

#VIDEO GAME TESSELLATION ART FULL#

Although the game’s visuals weren’t bad looking as released, they fell far short of fulfilling hopes that Crytek’s latest would be one of those rare games capable of taking full advantage of the processing power packed into a state-of-the-art PC. The promised DX11 support was nowhere to be found. Upon release, Crysis 2 supported only DirectX 9, with very limited user adjustments, like so many other games cross-developed for the consoles. Crytek assured its fans that no such thing would happen and, in a tale told countless times in recent years, proceeded to drop the ball dramatically. Developer Crytek, a PC favorite, decided to expand into consoles with this latest release, which caused PC gamers to fear that the system-punishing glory of Crytek’s prior, PC-only games might be watered down to fit the inferior hardware in the console market. By now, if you follow these things, you probably know the sordid story of DirectX 11 support in Crysis 2.