Tessellation has been touted as one of the major features in newer graphics APIs like DirecX 11, and it is shown as a standalone stage in a modern graphics pipeline.Compared to the amount of hardware and software attention given to this feature, it doesn't seem to be heavily used in real-time graphics. So this doesn't seem to be a feature that arose out of graphical demand.Then why did tessellation become such a prominent feature? To cater to the demands of non-realtime rendering? As a side-effect of the increasing shift in GPU architecture as generalized parallel processors in heterogeneous computing? Or is this a forward-thinking feature that will be used in graphics as tessellation-capable GPUs become increasingly common?
Why did tessellation come to be a prominent feature?
gpu;directx11;tesselation
History: ATI Introduced PN triangles (a basic approach to tessellation) in its first generation to include programmable HW - so it's been around about as long as programmable HW shaders. It was deprecated in ATI's next generation, but tessellation was revived in the HW that became the basis of the Xbox 360 (a few ATI demos showed it off on PCs). Microsoft then incorporated the feature into DX11 (although not compatible with ATI/AMD's existing HW), making tessellation support a de-facto requirement for all GPU makers.