Crysis 2 Update a Perfect Case of Wasted Polygons 159
crookedvulture writes "Crytek made news earlier this summer by releasing a big DirectX 11 update for the PC version of its latest game, Crysis 2. Among other things, the update added extensive tessellation to render in-game elements with a much higher number of polygons. Unfortunately, it looks like most of those extra polygons have been wasted on flat objects that don't require more detail or on invisible layers of water that are rendered even in scenes made up entirely of dry land. Screenshots showing the tessellated polygon meshes for various items make the issue pretty obvious, and developer tools confirm graphics cards are wasting substantial resources rendering these useless or unseen polygons. Interestingly, Nvidia had a hand in getting the DirectX 11 update rolled out, and its GeForce graphic cards just happen to perform better with heavy tessellation than AMD's competing Radeons."
Re:Hmmmm. (Score:4, Informative)
It's worth noting that most benchmarks use a certain version of popular games. If next version breaks benchmark functionality in a significant way, testers simply continue using old version.
Then again, has crysis 2 ever been used a serious benchmark? The game actually looked worse then crysis (especially warhead) in terms of graphics in spite of having higher polygon counts and such, and was designed from ground up to work on machines that would never be able to run original crysis or warhead (current gen consoles).