Tessellation for City of Heroes?

After ordering a new graphics card with DirectX 11 technology (Yes I know City of heroes is OpenGL-run, I'm not implying it uses Dx) and was reading up on the features included and came across a processing technique called Tesselation.

To those who don't know what that means, it's apparently the tiling of a plane or surface by smaller sub-surfaces, which is done on the GPU but can also be enabled on geometry shaders as well, including that of OpenGL except on Nvidia cards (don't know why). The effect of tessellation is that it can make all kinds of models look so much more detailed by physically altering the model to physically appear detailed, not just look detailed from head-on like with Normal maps. One source I found said that Tessellation can not only enhance geometry but also increases performance! Allowing you to render things six times as fast and save more than 50% of your video memory, as well as the bandwidth saved from uploading less geometry. Though I believe those figures are the rendering-times of a tessellated high-quality model in comparison to a high quality model without it.

I've seen pictures and video where you can create mountain ranges through tessellation alone (huge bumps) and also be able to smooth out the outline of objects (like if the Valkyrie shoulder armour was perfectly rounded instead of the barely-noticable breaks in roundness due to resolution size). Where people talk about water fidelity and tessellation they've shown videos where the ocean surface looks practically like it does in real life, no predictable waves or textures.


But here comes the suggestion, with the advent of Ultra-mode, wouldn't it be great if Paragon studios tried to implement uses of Tessellations in their designs? When people complain about graphics they do talk about old models and such, why not use tessellation to add some extra physical detail to these models? Why not make the old flattish buildings stand out more with details? Round out purposefully roundish models, maybe even character faces with rounded eyeballs that don't end up stretching around when you mess with the brow slider? Since Ultra-mode is seen as optional into playing the game, wouldn't Tessellation give this game a bit of a graphical boost while not creating massive loads in comparison to other games?

I'm not exactly a hardware/software technical person so I don't know how practical it would be to consider Tessellation into the game, and I really hope people read this paragraph and don't faceplant me for suggesting something I don't completely understand. But the basic benefit of Tessellation is that basically you can make smaller models appear just as good as regular models and make regular models even more detailed than you could reasonably transmit over a network like an MMO.

But basically what I'm saying is, Tessellation for City of Heroes?

We just had a graphical upgrade. Not saying it wouldn't be cool if it works as you say, but I'd think there's better things to focus on than more shiny graphics when we just got those a couple of issues ago. Some of us play games for things other than the latest shiny technology, after all.

I've been hearing about this since 2002. I have yet to see a single actual functioning game use it. I'd wait to see the tech solidify first, but sure - why not?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Okay, but see here's the problem. You forgot where he mentioned "Functioning game" As in, game on the market, heck even game in development using these techniques.

Tech demos mean absolutely diddly squat because it does not count for the human element interacting with it. Might as well link Toy Story movies and ask why we can't have such lifelike graphics for MMOs.

Don't mean to sound like a killjoy, but presenting something a bit more valid would help your case. I'm not even going to bring up the question of whether it would even be compatible with the City of Heroes engine at all.

As a side note you just linked the same video twice.

Don't get me wrong, I am an avid RPer and graphics hit right home to me just because beautiful scenery (and likewise grotesque scenery) is a great tool of immersion. I'd just want far more validity as Sam said.

Thanks for the extra info on the subject je_saist, I knew nVidia didn't have much to do with Tessellation until recently but didn't quite know how many ATI cards used it. I also didn't know that Ultra-mode was focused on particular OpenGL versions too.

Also, I've managed to recover the missing second video I was trying to link earlier and edited my post as such.

When I say "new" technology, I mean in the sense of practical application in the field of game design. I don't know what the reason is that this hasn't been used in games before despite demonstrably having existed for many years, but I interpret that fact to mean that there is A reason. As such, I'd like to see the technology implemented by another retail game first, I'd like to see how it works there, I'd like to see what kind of a performance hit it makes and I want to see how much it actually improves the experience.

After all, volumetric lights have existed as a concept in computer graphics for over ten years, probably much more. However, they were far too processor-intensive to use in real-time 3D, and were therefore restricted to 3D modelling programmes like Max. I'm not sure if they've entered actual gaming these days, but even if they have, they have not been a new technology for a long time, and yet nevertheless were inapplicable in games just the same.

Basically, I want to see the Unreal engine or the Source engine or something use them first.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Games with Tessellation Support - Dirt 2 (through update), Alien vs Predator (through update), Metro 2033 (First Game to have it Native), These are just the ones that i have that do have it and run well on my SLI Nvidia 460 GPU's It's nice and although im not really adding anything to this discussion i would like to say i do hope that they do eventually release an official patch that enables it. As for anybody saying NEW most technologies are old idea's that were just shelved and the creators will eventually bring them out....someday.

I'm not necessarily against the idea of this game looking as super-cool as possible using Tessellation or any other bleeding-edge graphics tech. But game development is always a process of compromise and priorities. If our Devs focused on trying to get this game looking as up-to-date as possible they would almost necessarily have to sacrifice in other areas. If I had the choice between this game looking like it was made yesterday with the very latest techniques or a game that looks like it was made a few years ago but had twice as much game content to play with I'd always go for the latter.