Its no real secret that video game graphics have hit a wall. For most of gaming's history graphics have been on a constant, almost exponential pace driven by consumer demands for more and more beautiful graphics. To an extent, graphics could make or break a game - Quake, for example, dramatically altered the way games were expected to look.
But for the past few years, graphics development seems to have been stalled. Crysis was the last great advancement for PC gaming graphics, and while some games have been almost as difficult to run, such as Arma 2, none have had the same level of eye candy.
The reasons for this stall are legion. Part of the blame can be laid on consoles. The latest generation has lasted longer than any before it, and because consoles sales are usually larger than PC sales, most titles have their graphics optimized with the less capable hardware of consoles in mind. But this would not be an issue if graphics were not so expensive to enhance. As models and textures become more detailed, the time and effort required has also gone up. This additional time and effort would not be an issue in a less competitive industry, but the gaming industry is cut-throat, and devolopers need to keep costs as low as possible.
This trifecta of problems has stalled progress, leaving PC gamers with little to justify the latest and greatest video cards. But there is some hope for the future.
One of the reasons graphics have been stalled is the high cost of creating high-quality graphics. But what if a developer could create 3D models which scaled dynamically, becoming incredibly detailed on high-end systems but simple and easy to render on less capable machines?
This would be something of a holy grail, but it is exactly what tessellation aims to accomplish. Tessellation has been around for awhile and primarily promoted by ATI, which incorporated it into the GPU for the Xbox 360 and has offered it on their own computer GPUs for some time. As if often the case, however, promotion of a feature which is not standardized has been slow going. But DirectX 11, now available on PCs running Windows 7 and Vista, includes a standard for tessellation, which means this feature will now be available for use on all GPUs which support DirectX 11.
The Tessellation supported by DirectX 11 is done in the hardware, which means that it is very easy for games which support DirectX 11 to make use of it. All the developer needs to do is input certain data defining the basics of what a 3D object is and the hardware tessellation will jump in and do the rest. This means that a 3D artist can make a more basic model and then allow hardware tessellation to up the polygon count, a method which should prove much quicker and much easier than any other method of increasing a 3D model's detail.