On the thread about the Moscow exhibition there's an interesting quote from mr. Maddox.
Long story short, he says tesselation in its current form is not very useful for the SoW engine. The reason is that since tesselation generates "protrusions" on surfaces on its own it results in a more or less unpredictable end result, one that will end up messing up their finely crafted aircraft models. I guess techniques like it are good for modelling complex but non specific things, like waves on the water or a cape flowing in the wind, wrinkles on clothes, etc, but not for things that need to be accurately shaped and sized in a predictable manner.
He says they might incorporate it in the future though.
Quite useful in deciding what kind of GPU to go for.
I think i've read that nVidia cards have more tesselation-specific shader processors than the Ati ones, but Ati cards usually have more shader processors overall (tesselation and generic).
This results in nVidia being faster under heavy tesselation load and Ati being faster under normal DX11 graphics that don't use much tesselation. Since SoW will not use it that much, i guess the best bang for the buck (esp since the new engine is DX based and not OpenGL) will be to wait for the new GPU releases and resulting price drops in previous series and pick up a 58xx series Ati card.
What would be interesting to know however is if tesselation applies globally or not. For example, is it possible to apply it only on terrain features and leave the carefully modelled aircraft alone?
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