According to this slide, the tessellation engine of the new Radeon HD 7970 is up to 4X faster than Radeon HD 6970 one. The performance peak is reached for a tessellation level of 13.
Can’t wait to verify this affirmation with TessMark or MSI Kombustor… If it’s true, the GTX 580 could lose the title of master of tessellation…
Do you remember the difference between the HD 6970 and HD 5870?
Had seen some slides which confirms there are multiple primitive pipes and rasterization pipes. From what we see here there might be 8 tess/geometry pipes however scan conversion pipes is big unknown. Cayman has 2 of each while cypress only one tess/geometry and 2 scan conversion. Fermi has 16 tess/geometry (polymorph engine) and 4 raster engines (GPC) so new AMD GPU shouldn’t lose so badly to GF110 in tess extreme, however I doubt nv will stick to those 16 tess units.