|EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Titanium Video Card|
|Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards|
|Written by Olin Coles|
|Tuesday, 25 January 2011|
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NVIDIA Fermi Features
In today's complex graphics, tessellation offers the means to store massive amounts of coarse geometry, with expand-on-demand functionality. In the NVIDIA GF100-series GPU, tessellation also enables more complex animations. In terms of model scalability, dynamic Level of Detail (LOD) allows for quality and performance trade-offs whenever it can deliver better picture quality over performance without penalty. Comprised of three layers (original geometry, tessellation geometry, and displacement map), the final product is far more detailed in shade and data-expansion than if it were constructed with bump-map technology. In plain terms, tessellation gives the peaks and valleys with shadow detail in-between, while previous-generation technology (bump-mapping) would give the illusion of detail.
Using GPU-based tessellation, a game developer can send a compact geometric representation of an object or character and the tessellation unit can produce the correct geometric complexity for the specific scene. Consider the "Imp" character illustrated above. On the far left we see the initial quad mesh used to model the general outline of the figure; this representation is quite compact even when compared to typical game assets. The two middle images of the character are created by finely tessellating the description at the left. The result is a very smooth appearance, free of any of the faceting that resulted from limited geometry. Unfortunately this character, while smooth, is no more detailed than the coarse mesh. The final image on the right was created by applying a displacement map to the smoothly tessellated third character to the left.
Benchmark Reviews also more detail in our full-length NVIDIA GF100 GPU Fermi Graphics Architecture guide.
GeForce GTX-Series Products