Hardware Tesselation

Feature Requests Engine Features
1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to make textures have a sense of depth, like in metal or bricks, we would have to import a 3d model with the displacement like this if we want our stuff to have some depth

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example

How hardware tesselation works?
basically it subdivides large polygons on the gpu to add geometric detail;

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example in blender

The advantages of this technique is:

  • Adds more detail to the terrain, especially on rocks and grass
  • Higher quality geometry
  • Reduces Memory Bandwidth

Now, you might say, “OH THIS IS NOT GONNA BE GOOD FOR LOW END HARDWARE!!!111”

I personally tested a game called Hitman: Absolution, which was released in 2012, with medium + some high settings on a 2010 pc, and it ran at the engine’s framecap of 60 FPS, which is totally playable, it would probably go even higher if it didn’t have that cap, but anyways, you don’t need top of the line hardware to run this cool feature which was released when Windows 7 launched along with DirectX 11.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because it would help creators add depth to their textures and terrain

14 Likes
2

Yes heightmap/parallax support on SurfaceAppearences would be amazing for bricks or any texture with meaningful depth.

3 Likes
3

normal maps

2 Likes
4

can’t be 3d

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3 Likes
5

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this is the difference between normal map and normal + tesselation, roblox could mix both, just like other game engines

6

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as you can see, this runs at extremely high fps even in a hd 5870, which can be found for 20-30 bucks on local marketplaces

1 Like
7

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at 1440p, the hd 5770 gets playable fps

8

i managed to get 120-130 fps on this test with 600k+ polygons with textures at 2048x2048

9

Heightmaps in general would be greatly apreciated, hope this gets added.

2 Likes
10

Greater control over PBR maps is needed across the board :sob:

2 Likes
11

Normal map intensity, basic metalness/roughness slider, etc would be amazing

1 Like
12

needs to be added, should’ve been added a long time ago. this tech is half a decade older than roblox for context

The first consumer graphics card with hardware-accelerated tessellation was the ATI Radeon 8500 (released in August 2001), which featured an N-patch hardware technology called TruForm.

2 Likes
13


nvidia demo showcasing this feature

1 Like