New 3DMark 11 coming in September

No, this is, "you heard it here first" breaking news

 

Heaven is rubbish. It gives no representation of real world usage because it exaggerates the benefits of tessellation by tessellating the environment far more than will ever happen in the real world in order to generate a false performance gradient.

 

Well we don't really have any real tessellated games at the moment, a few flags in Dirt 2 don't really count. But in the future we might have games that make use of 'heavy tessellation' and in the benchmark you can guage how your pc will cope with this. Its like physx, its being used a bit but in the future it could be used much more heavily to make games more realistic.

No more characters with stiff clothes and stiff hair, yay.

 

PhysX hardware support has been around since mid-2006. If it was so awesome, why has it taken four years for a game to use it extensively, two with nVidia's blessing and marketing power?

The reason why 'heavy tessellation' is a bit crap is the way that Unigine has implemented it. Look at this image: http://www.hardocp.com/images/articles/12573821526izM8p4LAl_1_14_l.png

Two things are very obvious. Firstly, the original wireframe is crap.The circular cannon has between 12-16 sides. It's like calling this a circle: http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/37300/37388/12-gon_37388_lg.gif

So, any comparisons you see are totally flawed, because the levels aren't even representative of current games, let alone games in the future. This is the stock image. Looking at it, the only thing for me that differentiates it from a game like Quake 3 (or at least CoD2) is the fancy DX11 lighting. http://www.hardocp.com/images/articles/12573821526izM8p4LAl_1_19_l.jpg
Now, of course there's going to be a big difference when you go to tessellated, but in the comparison above you can see that each polygon is about the size of a pinhead! I did a rough estimate of how many polygons there are in that simple cannon, and there are roughly the same number that they put in the cars in racing games. More, in fact. The most detailed user modded cars I've ever seen in racing games (CTDP cars) have roughly 5k polygons in, I reckon there's about 6-8k in the end of that cannon.
As you can see, they've played down their non-tessellated map and made their tessellated map more taxing, specifically to stress systems more than any game actually will.

The point by which that number of polygons is standard will be far beyond the current generations of graphics cards, and buying a card based on it's tessellating capability is somewhat stupid, because no self-respecting level designer would ever make a level with that low a resolution for DX9 and DX10 users, who still form about 50% of the gaming market.

The time when tessellation will be widely used is years ahead of us, and whilst it is with us now, the sorts of games that will require tessellation in the same way that Heaven does won't be released until the ATI 8k series and GeForce 780 are on the market

 

This would be a welcome update as some of the old synthetic benchmarks didn't test the graphics cards to their full extent... or so I am told!

 

Tech demo of the 'Deep Sea' benchmark from 3dmark 11
Looks very nice....