tessellation

[KG26_Alpha]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

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?

Yes.


This might explain it for you.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tessellation.html

In games with large, open environments you have probably noticed distant objects often pop in and out of existence.
This is due to the game engine switching between different levels of detail, or LOD, to keep the geometric workload in check.
Up until this point, there has been no easy way to vary the level of detail continuously since it would require keeping many versions of the same model or environment.
Dynamic tessellation solves this problem by varying the level of detail on the fly.
For example, when a distant building first comes into view, it may be rendered with only ten triangles.
As you move closer, its prominent features emerge and extra triangles are used to outline details such as its window and roof.
When you finally reach the door, a thousand triangles are devoted to rendering the antique brass handle alone, where each groove is carved out meticulously with displacement mapping.
With dynamic tessellation, object popping is eliminated, and game environments can scale to near limitless geometric detail.

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