zarx said:
sure but that procedurally generates polygons, sure you probably can't tell the difference and is in many cases far better and much more flexable than just using super complex models. But it is still not the same thing, and we are still many years away from seeing that level of detail in games even with tesselation. And we all know synthetic numbers like that are meaningless. And the fact that the elemental demo has tech that allows 1 million particles is completely irrelevant to the discussion. ANd the poly counts in the ellemental demo aren't that impressive
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The thing is having a high polycount isn't always a good thing. For example it's been a widely used trick for years now that in 3ds max (a professional 3d render program) that you only have as many polygons as is required. For example, the lecture I saw stated that there is no point in having a 1000 polygon teapot, and one that is made up of only 30 if the viewing distance is greater then 20 meters as you won't be able to perceive the difference. Therefore many scenes are rendered with the optimal amount of polygons in hollywood animation as this saves on time (and therefore cost) and the end result is not percievably different. Tesselation simply does this on the fly. Gunning for high polycount regardless of the scene isn't a goal anyone should, or actually does, aim for.
I think you need to step back and ask just how many polygons you actually want to see. The fact that particle effects (not polygons I know) are reaching over 1 million particles, while having tesselation available, really is quite remarkable:
How many triangles is that? Same with this one:
