GT5 vs Forza 3

[Squilliam]

JaggedSac said:

Squilliam said:
Though in a racing game, its the easiest thing to cut. Though I wonder if they've got the tessellation engine working on the terrain? Its a hard thing to get right, but if they do it it can really increase the polygon density quite cheaply. Ensemble used in on Halo Wars' Terrain as well.

That is a good point.  Still shots or the starting line are probably the only time to see the ground textures closely.

I did not know that Ensemble used tessellation in Halo Wars.  The terrain was nice in that game. 

Turn 10 may have used it considering how well that track and the surroundings looks.

My partially educated guess is that cars are the ideal suitor to the tessellation engine in the Xbox 360. They are quite regular shapes. Microsoft released the SDK for DX11 (Incl Tessellation) at the end of 2008/start of 2009 so they would have had it in development and available to their studios for much longer than that. I suspect that the tessellation engine took a load off the shaders which could then be applied to the cars in the form of the likely extremely complicated shader ops for the paint etc.

I haven't played Halo Wars yet, sorry!