What would I gain from a new GPU?

[arespirit]

Hi Tom's Forum,

I usually try to stay informed about all things hardware, but I have been very preoccupied as of late so I need some help. Would someone please give a brief description of how video cards tessellation works and how it differs within the confines of directx 10.1 and 11? I am asking because I am trying to figure out if I should or shouldn't be considering updating my video cards and from what I can tell tessellation seems to be a big factor. If there is anything else I should know about Directx 11 that impacts gaming please feel free to inform me. Thanks!

My Rig:

Intel Core I5-2500k OCed 4.12
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
Crucial Ballistix 8G (4x2GB) DDR3 1600 XMP
WD Caviar Black 640GB
2 Diamond HD 4890 OCed 950/1100 in Crossfire
Sony Optical
Antec Neo Eco 620W PSU

 

[farrengottu]

this vid shows a lot of examples of differences between dx10 and dx11 with a lot of tessellation examples thrown in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uavLefzDuQ

 

[arespirit]

Farrengottu thanks for the video it was helpful, but one of the mute points I am trying to find more information on is tessellation in Directx 10.1. To my knowledge my HD 4890's are capable of performing tessellation, but where I am getting confused is some refer to it as a function of hardware while other refer to it as a function of software / coding. Mainly I am asking because if I find out that my 4890's are capable of more than AMD is allowing through the restriction of a software update or bios flash I am making sure my next purchase is of an Nvidia product.

 

[SkyWalker1726]

i think that Tesselation came with DirectX11 , and as far as i know AMD 4xxx do not support DX11 , so no DX11 no tesselation

( nVidia is EVIL 😀 Do not fall t the DarKsIDE ... )

 

[arespirit]

SkyWalker I had a friend find this for me!

Via AMD

Using GPU tessellation on characters and terrain allows superior detail and high-quality animation. The GPU tessellation is used to subdivide and displace the characters so that they never look “low-poly” or triangulated and flat. Displacement mapping captures the fine scale details of the character. The difference in the amount of high fidelity details such as the bumps on the skin is instantly noticeable. The tessellation level is dynamically calculated per-frame as a function of the number of tessellated characters in the view for a stable frame rate in dense crowd situations. At the highest level of tessellation, a single froblin character can be rendered with as many as 1.6 million triangles! Froblins that are far off in the distance are drawn using a simplified, non-tessellated, mesh. Animated character rendering performance is improved with a multi-pass approach augmented with vertex compression and decompression on the fly to reduce memory footprint and bandwidth utilization. The combination of GPU tessellation, displacement mapping and effective use of Direct3D® 10.1 functionality allows high quality character rendering even in large crowd scenarios.

The full story can be found at: http://developer.amd.com/samples/demos/pages/froblins.aspx

I am having a hard time understanding who I should blame for the fact that my video cards are not being optimized and detected as devices that are compatible with tessellation. I want games to detect my hardware as capable of providing effects like tessellation even though they are not directx 11 compliant.

 

[eax1]

From what you have now, you could see a great increase in performance for sure.