(Tested) OpenGL 4 Tessellation With Displacement Mapping

OpenGL logo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo


Just wanted to say that GPU tessellation is really cool! Here are some screenshots from my new piece of OpenGL code that will be available shortly, very shortly 😉

The screenshots show to what a control cage mesh (here a sphere) with 20000 polygons looks like with displacement mapping. The control cage is the low res mesh (low number of polygons). I used a uniform tessellation level of 32 and I played with various height and normal maps. It’s just amazing to see how some simple textures can shape a simple sphere…

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

OpenGL 4 tessellation demo

I successfully tested my new benchmark on a GTX 480 (R259.09 and R258.96), and on a HD 5770 (Cat 10.6 and Cat 10.7). But on a HD 5870 WITH Catalyst 10.7, here is the result:

OpenGL 4 tessellation  - HD  5870 + Cat 10.7


I had to use a camera to shot the bug because it was impossible under Seven. Catalyst 10.7 seems to have a serious bug with Radeon HD 5870 and OpenGL tessellation…

14 thoughts on “(Tested) OpenGL 4 Tessellation With Displacement Mapping”

  1. WacKEDmaN

    awesomeeee!! some of them almost look like a deathstar! :p

    tessellation really kicks ass! cant wait to

  2. nap

    What about performance comparison of non-tessellated sphere and tessellated sphere with displacement mapping on ATI and NV?

  3. JeGX Post Author

    A tessellation level of 32 means a triangle is divided in around 1500 sub triangles. So the non tessellated version of the sphere would have 20000 *1500 = 300M polys.

    I quickly tested a 8M polys sphere (can’t alloc more!) with a tess level of 1, and the demo ran at around 10 FPS on my GTX 480.

    With a tess level of 32 and the original sphere (20000 faces then 300M polys when tessellated), the demo runs at around 30 FPS and on a HD 5870 (Cat10.6) the same demo runs at around 5 FPS…

  4. nap

    30 fps on extra-highend videocard is too slow. Looks like tessellation is not useful for real-world projects. We will have to use high tess level to apply displacement mapping, for example, on high-detail building and we will get comparable polys count with low fps.

  5. Pingback: [GPU Tool] GPU Caps Viewer 1.9.0 With OpenGL 4 Tessellation Support - 3D Tech News, Pixel Hacking, Data Visualization and 3D Programming - Geeks3D.com

  6. JeGX Post Author

    There’s no DL in this post. It’s just a gallery of GPU tessellation. The soft used to create these images will be released shortly.

  7. Pingback: Real-Time Rendering · Clearing the Queue (a little)

  8. mantas

    wou, that is cool indeed.. open gl.. does that mean its all gpu calculated? therefore soon for new games???

  9. cigraphics

    I have an Ati HD 5650 and it says that my videocard doesn’t support OpenGL 4

Comments are closed.