My gripe with all console manufacturers using AMD powered graphics ...

[Pemalite]

Eddie_Raja said:

Pemalite said:

GProgrammer said:
With my Graphics Programmer cap on

Tessellation is way down the list of useful GFX tech

I disagree.
Geometry is going to play a massive role this coming generation.
is much more scalable.

Disagree all you want.  Tessalation is way over done in Nvidia games to make AMD cards look bad.  Play BF4.  Highest poligon counts you will see, and guess what?  AMD card perform way better...

 

AMD cards are just fine at high polygon counts as long as you aren't deliberatily trying to sabotage the competition. (It's not like Nvidia is known to do that /s)

Battlefield 4 isn't exactly "pushing" Tessellation all that hard, neither did Battlefield 3 really, not in a direction that many people expect anyhow.
Besides, AMD's drivers by default profile tessellation factors depending on the game and set a setting that compromises some quality for speed, so it's not always transparent.

Unigen Heaven, that kind of geometric detail is probably what many are hoping for this generation, it can look pretty fricken awesome even on modest hardware several years old.


Certainly more impressive than bump mapped/flat ground that we are all used to.
It's simply going to take time for game engines, programmers to catch up, they have been stuck in last generation land for to long.

lt_dan_27 said:

I think I'll agree with the graphics programmer on this one. 

Good thing I have done "Graphics programming" before too then.
I wrote shaders for Oblivion and Fallout 3 (In order to make them run on Xbox 1 class graphics hardware), made a 2D sprite-based game with some hardware accellerated framebuffer effects (Still not finished, one day!).
And if I go back to when I was only a child, I wrote my first game in Beginners-All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) on the commodore 64, which was an ASCII based game where the goal was to fly a plane and not crash it.

fatslob-:O said:

Why would anyone want to store the generated vertex's ? The point of tessellation is to create more detail in a procedural way. The endless city demo wouldn't even be possible in the first place because of large memory overhead in storing over a billion triangles! Your reasons for tessellation being superior in the xbox one is wrong for the most part seeing as how the performance scales with CLOCKS which is quite pathetic on AMD's part. How in the hell does a 7870 kick's 7950 in the ass in tessmark ? This still means that even with the higher clocks the xbox one would only perform 5% better than the PS4 in tessmark and if we go to tess factors of under 16 the PS4 will most likely take it due to the fact that somehow their tessellators would actually respond to those factors. 

What AMD needs to seriously do is have a truly parallel solution otherwise it's going to be another embarrassing slaughter on the tessellation front. 

You should ask AMD that same very question. :P

The problem is, the geometry engines need large caches to store data to keep everything fed, when AMD moved from a single geometry engine to having two of them it didn't increase the caches as it was transister and thus die-size constrained at the 40nm fabrication process. (I.E. Radeon 69xx series.)
So their only option was to store it into System Ram or the GPU's Ram, the GPU's Ram was it, hence why in some games AMD's GPU's may use more memory than nVidia to run the same game on those particular cards.

But I do iterate I haven't actually looked into AMD's tessellation improvements with the GCN hardware to any great degree, so I'm not sure if the above still applies.