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."
Hmmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're saying that a graphics card company just *might* have tried to get a company writing a largely-used benchmark in their favor.
Not that it's ever happened before... *coughintelnvidiacough*...
Re:Not surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
Valve and id are the most obvious exceptions
Try saying that to John Carmack.
I think that was the point. Mr. Carmack works for Idthesda, and Valve's Source engine is based on GoldSrc, which in turn was forked from the engine of Quake (early Id Tech 2) written by Mr. Carmack.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
I work in games. You sir, are an idiot. Are you seriously comparing a game engine to RenderMan? We have to render a game's frame in 16ms, you have to render a frame in something less than a minute. I read the entire article. This was clearly a patch meant to appease the PC gamers into thinking that it wasn't a shoddy console port.