Drowning in floating points
Before tessellation, high-quality computer-generated characters required significant compute resources, but after tessellation came into play, developers could use low-quality models, run through the tessellation engine - thereby creating high-detail models with a lower compute overhead.
Talking to HEXUS recently, Huddy admitted he found tessellation titillating, telling us it "solves a lot of problems and can do some very cool things with floating point math."
"We would like to be able to use it to render movies in real time," Huddy told us, adding this was now much closer to reality thanks to DX11.
Huddy explained that paired with parallax mapping - an enhancement of the bump-mapping techniques applied to textures in 3D rendering apps - tessellation made it that much simpler to carry out the sub-division surface calculations which smashed the surface up and rendered things more "pixel perfect".
"It achieves a much higher quality at three times the speed," Huddy marvelled, noting "none of us knew that would be the standard use of tessellation."
"We can fake the whole thing in the DX11 pipeline," he concluded.
