| HappySqurriel said: Since before the XBox 360 and PS3 were released we were beginning to approach a point where hardware processing power was no longer going to limit the amount of detail in a game; and processing power would only limit the kinds of graphical effects that were present. Now, I don't know if the Wii U has hit that point but I would say the primary limiting factor to how detailed games are is the level of detail that developers are willing to produce. What I'm referring to is advanced level of detail technologies ... Essentially, GPUs have gotten powerful enough to render more polygons to the screen than there are pixels in the image they're producing; and rendering more and more polygons does not lead to more detail in the image. We haven't seen this materialize yet because the amount of memory required to hold the highest detailed version of models in memory has been prohibitive. Basically, when part of a model takes up most of the screen you may need hundreds of thousands of polygons on that model to hide polygonalization artifacts and a massive texture to hide pixelation, and most systems released so far could only hold a handful of these models and textures in memory at a given time. Enter tessellation
Tesselation empowers the GPU to subdivide the model eliminating polygonalization artifacts, similar texture subdivision can be done to eliminate pixelation, and then vertex shaders can be run to "add" detail to the new surface. The net effect can look like this:
For those who will ask "Can that run on the Wii U", if the rumoured specs are correct than the answer is yes (probably above 30fps at 720p with 4xAA): Misread chart (googled for 4850 and read 4870 when realy was 7870), but concept is still valid Edit: Ran on my Radeon 5770 (not much better than rumoured Wii U GPU) with moderate levels of tesselation, directX 11 at 720p it ran at between 25 and 30fps for most of the demo; with a few places running far better and a few places running far worse. When looking at the wireframes, and toggling tessellation on and off, they're doing some pretty extreme subdivision even at the lowest settings. While the Wii U couldn't produce a replica of the video and maintain a decent framerate, the effect is certaily viable on similar hardware to increase detail above and beyond what the current HD consoles are doing |
You should have used the Frobllins demo. It was actually made for the 4850.
Of course the GPU and CPU in thd WIi U are custom built. The GPU will have a DX11 level tesselator which the 4850 didn't.
