Another buzzword. Its essentially vertex (de)compression done by the GPU. UC2 (and others) do vertex pre-processing on a large scale to make things look like they do already. Maybe comparable to tessellation, but more like vertex reduction before those hit the render pipeline (essentially having the same effect - higher polys where you need them and cut off the ones you don't need (culling and clipping)). Nice that its now build into an API and newer GPUs can do that in HW. Not new, though.

@iMad
oh man you are sooooo full of it
before TGS you and some other guy claims to be a developer said that MS well show us
this so called "X-engine"
and they'll show halo reach on it

what happened to that ??

was visually a lot better here, the others only looked like they changed shape/position. I hope they will find better ways to draw an advantage of this or else it may not be owrth all the computing power it requires. I'll have to see some more impressive in-game examples if I'm gonna be interested in buying a DX11 card NOW... think I'll wait.

You won't see much gain out of tessellation. It's a geometric replacement for repeating patterns that will help free up processing for other graphic elements. It won't drastically add any detail potential.

The screenshots, especially the house one, are a bit misleading. You can create the exact same texture repeating areas in DX10 and DX11, only the DX11 would use slightly less processing from your GPU. This is okay for the 360, but it still won't allow for much more beyond what is there now. For PCs, it really doesn't matter since GPUs have so much power with the latest cards that the processing power they gain for using them is already available.

Yeah... no, cgoodno. Yes, tessellation is a tiling effect of the geometry. But DX11 cards have tessellation units built into the hardware. So they can increase the polygon count to mass amount with hardly any performance hit. By increasing the detail of the mesh this way, you can create vast landscapes that look unique and highly detailed. You can create perfectly smooth, round or rocky shapes without actually having to create a high polygon model that would take a ton of processing power to render.

Also by applying the bump map data using tessellation, it doesn't just use lighting and culling effects to make something look say rocky for example. The bump map data can be used to actually tessellate and then deform the mesh. Making it physically that shape.

Check out this mountain scene demo of Tessellation in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

And this video demonstrates the what I was talking about with bump mapping:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

This technology has a HUGE impact on the quality of our games. And is another big step closer to running realistic scenes in real-time.