I was thinking about the advantages of Hardware Tessellation. I can see mainly three:
- Compression
Reduces on-disk storage, system, video memory usage ->only the coarse mesh is stored
Animation data is only stored for the coarse mesh
- Memory bandwidth
GPU fetches only vertex data of coarse mesh through PCI-E bus -> higher vertex cache and fetch performance
- Scalability
Subdivision is recursive -> offers auto-LOD with adaptive metrics
With the DirectX 11 implementation it might also reduce the workload of the vertex shader because the shader transforms or animates only the coarse mesh. But if we add up the additional workload of the hull and domain shader it might be a wash.
For console developers, being able to store more world geometry on disc and in memory would be a great advantage. The reduction of the read memory bandwidth -while reading the data from memory- would also increase the efficiency.
The main question is if tessellating the geometry puts such a huge workload on the GPU that it is not feasible. I would love to have some real-world data here ...
