The tessellation support contained in all the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series allows for the generation of highly detailed geometry from simple base meshes and displacement maps. This feature enables game developers to significantly raise the visual quality and complexity of their titles while lowering the cost of development. Tessellation offers a number of benefits in addition to increased geometric complexity - including more animation data, higher quality animation and stable, predictable performance. Tessellation is also an effective method of compression for both vertex and animation data giving both memory and storage savings.
The detailed geometry of the mountain range is generated on the fly using displacement mapping from a coarse base mesh. With tessellation and ATI Radeon HD 2000 series displacement mapped surfaces finally become first class citizens. In addition, the snow cover is generated procedurally, based on the slope of the generated geometry.



