Unigine Heaven Benchmark and my PC....

[Orzene]

Probably deserves to be in a different thread, but I've searched, and to no avail...

Trying to run the damn Unigine Heaven benchmark, but no matter what setting I use, I can't get their geometry tessellation to work. I'm not tech savvy enough to know why. My systems supports DX11, though my two cards are the older 8800GTX's. Not sure what else could be of help..

Already installed, un-installed, and re-installed...

Have the lastest drivers.

Tried the batch files that come with...

No luck. :\ I'm quite curious as to if my system is too far behind the times that Tessellation is unavailable, or if there's a hardware/firmware error that I'm unaware of.

The gist of it is, is that entering the demo, you have an option to turn Tessellation on and off.. and for me, it's grayed out, no matter WHAT SETTING I USE. I'm sure my hardware isn't THAT old, but maybe it is.. I know the software supports tessellation in DX9 thru 11, as the options are clear. But, it's just not working for me.. and I'm just curious why. If I have to buy new hardware, then I'll just take it by word and the videos posted on the Unigine site. If there's a fix, I'd like to know about it...

 

[Woodsey]

8000 series cards can't run DX11.

 

[Jacob.pederson]

8800's do not support hardware tessellation. The only Nvidia cards to do this are the 400 series. Other than some pretty demos, no games really make good use of tessellation yet anyways, so I wouldn't worry to much about it. It may end up in the feature graveyard right next to parallax mapping

 

[Smooth Operator]

Ya, as they said.
You don't have support for DX11 nor tessellation, you need a newer ATI or Nvidia card for that.

On the other hand, no game is using these, nor will it for the next few years, so unless you have some bizarre wish to really see that benchmark at it's top quality, there is just no point to rushing it.

 

[Zer_]

8800's do not support hardware tessellation. The only Nvidia cards to do this are the 400 series. Other than some pretty demos, no games really make good use of tessellation yet anyways, so I wouldn't worry to much about it. It may end up in the feature graveyard right next to parallax mapping

I doubt it will end up in the feature graveyard. Tessellation allows for far more detail at little cost in performance.

Also, the list of games that support (and those that will) is getting longer every month.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support

Considering the fact that many more people are adopting Windows 7 than Vista, it's also logical to assume that developers will not ignore DX11.

It also has the potential to provide for a massive difference in geometry detail. The difference between these two screenshots is about 10-20 FPS at worst...

[http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v358/SuperFriendBFG/Unigine/?action=view&current=00012.jpg]

[http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v358/SuperFriendBFG/Unigine/?action=view&current=00011.jpg]

 

[Jacob.pederson]

8800's do not support hardware tessellation. The only Nvidia cards to do this are the 400 series. Other than some pretty demos, no games really make good use of tessellation yet anyways, so I wouldn't worry to much about it. It may end up in the feature graveyard right next to parallax mapping

I doubt it will end up in the feature graveyard. Tessellation allows for far more detail at little cost in performance.

Also, the list of games that support (and those that will) is getting longer every month.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support

Considering the fact that many more people are adopting Windows 7 than Vista, it's also logical to assume that developers will not ignore DX11.

It also has the potential to provide for a massive difference in geometry detail. The difference between these two screenshots is about 10-20 FPS at worst...

[http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v358/SuperFriendBFG/Unigine/?action=view&current=00012.jpg]

[http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v358/SuperFriendBFG/Unigine/?action=view&current=00011.jpg]

I'm aware of the potential benefits, we just haven't seen many as of yet. Dirt 2 uses some tessellation for some splashing water, and flags waving in wind, but I didn't find the additional fidelity to be worth the performance hit. (on sli gtx480's) Lost Planet 2 does show some significant DX11 improvements, and can still run at 60 fps most of the time; however, the frame-rate doesn't stay consistent with certain effects onscreen (blowing snow comes to mind.) So that leaves me flipping back and forth between the two modes Metro 2033 is probably my favorite DX11 game so far, with a ton of nice effects to pick from, and most importantly, DX11 doesn't break stereoscopic support for 3dvision like it does in Dirt 2 and Lost Planet 2.

There is no denying the incredible difference between DX9 and DX11 on Unigen's Heaven (although certain things still break in 3dvision). However, parallax mapping offered a somewhat similar look as tessellation (at a smaller performance hit), and outside of a few spots, it never really turned up in practice. The real make or break for a new feature dependent on hardware, is does it turn up on commodity cards (and can it run on them)? If it does, it'll be in the next-gen consoles, and we'll have it forever

 

[Zer_]

***Snip***

DX11 cards are cheap.

You can get a very good DX11 card for under 200 dollars. And don't even compare tessellation to parallax mapping. Parallax mapping can only be applied to a flat surface, and it works on a surface to surface basis. That means that it looks like shit the second it hits an edge. Tessellation doesn't suffer from those limitations. In fact the limitations are almost non-existent.

The only one I've seen thus far is that it will occasionally look a little wonky when dealing with animated characters, but that's mostly just clipping issues.