ATI To Fix Poor Tessellation Performance

NVIDIA fan boys have been cheering the launch of the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400 series of graphics cards. Finally, NVIDIA has graphics cards with enough teeth to pose a credible challenge to ATI's dominance in the desktop 3D graphics market. Just ignore the fact that both the GeForce GTX 480 and the GeForce GTX 470 suck up a tremendous amount of power and spew out enough heat to fry an egg. After all, isn't global warming just a rumour?

NVIDIA fan boys were especially pleased at how much faster the new GeForce GTX 480 graphics card is at tessellation compared to the ATI Radeon HD 5870. If you take a look at the benchmark results, they show that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 can be up to 9x faster at tessellation than the ATI Radeon HD 5870. In the Unigine Heaven DX11 benchmark, the GeForce GTX 480 was, on average, about twice as fast as the Radeon HD 4870 in scenes with high amounts of tessellation.

Why is this so important to NVIDIA fan boys? Well, they are all laughing with glee because this is the first time NVIDIA implemented hardware tessellation in their GPUs. ATI, on the other hand, has had years of experience - they first added hardware tessellation to their Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics cards. For NVIDIA to leapfrog past ATI in tessellation performance in their first attempt is seen as a testimony of NVIDIA's technical superiority in 3D graphics.

ATI Responds... In A Way

To find out how did ATI do so badly at tessellation when they spent years working on it, we shot them several e-mails. Needless to say, there was no response. Their PR team handling the Asia Pacific region was, as usual, somewhere in la-la land. It really makes you wonder why ATI even hired them - a wall would have been much cheaper and much better at the job (at least you get an echo!).

We would have given up right then, if we didn't happen to stumble upon a lead. Thanks to this kind soul, we managed to get in touch with a senior ATI executive (who is a friend of a friend of this friend, you get the idea). He was nice enough to squeeze in a few minutes for us. He sure had some interesting info on the issue. Take a look!

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