Tessellation: Enhance your geometry!
As GPUs become more powerful, we see many new applications of how they can be used as general compute devices often rivaling and surpassing the CPU. But at the same time, modern GPUs are augmented with tools and features that assist general computation. These new features add high performance paths that enhance graphics rendering capabilities. One such addition is GPU tessellation.
Tessellation in its most pure definition is the tiling of a plane or surface by smaller sub surfaces. On the GPU this translates into breaking geometry into smaller, more detailed pieces. ATI has previously done this through TrueForm® with mixed success. A tessellation mechanism can also be implemented using the geometry shader. But the new tessellation engine in ATI Radeon HD Series and FirePro/FireGL V Series graphics hardware automates this process (currently not available for OpenGL on any nVidia hardware). Very little work is needed to get this running in any OpenGL app, just enable tessellation state in OpenGL and pick your tessellation factor based on how detailed you would like the geometry to be. The application vertex shaders can also be updated to correct texture coordinates based on the generated geometry.
This powerful rendering mechanism can both enhance geometry and increase performance. By using tessellation, the same level of detail can be rendered at 6-times the speed and save more than 50% of video memory, not to mention the bandwidth saved from uploading significantly less geometry. (840 original triangle model, rendered at LOD of 1,008038 triangles with and without the tessellation engine) Such a performance boost in addition to the visual enhancement can provide a significant advantage for any application that adopts tessellation.
The result of tessellation is deterministic, and therefore well adapted to many CAD situations. But the biggest gains can be seen in digital content creation. Digital content models are often large and can be difficult to render in real-time. With tessellation, significantly smaller model sizes can be used for similar levels of detail. Pre-visualization paths can also make use of tessellation to provide better looking images faster than was previously possible. The example below is a fly-by done with tessellation enabled, showing how tessellation can enhance a landscape in real-time.
AMD has also created a white paper detailing how to implement Catmull Clark subdivision using the tessellation engine. The demo and whitepaper can be found here. Or explore many of the other possibilities for using tessellation on OpenGL or DirectX.