NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 review - bringing the best from Fermi

Unigine tessellation benchmark

Hardware-based tessellation is a cornerstone of DirectX 11. The ability to efficiently generate massive geometry and then to apply what's known as a displacement map makes it a tasty technique for adding complexity and detail to a scene without a huge computational cost.

Unigine's Heaven 2.1 benchmark tests the ability of DX11 GPUs to provide varying levels of tessellation and extra in-benchmark detail.

Here's the standard benchmark run at 1,920x1,080 with 4x AA and 16x AF. Hover your mouse over the picture to see the difference between no tessellation and moderate tessellation.

We ran the DX11 cards through the benchmark/tessellation test at all four settings; disabled, moderate, normal and extreme.

The tessellation performance of the GTX 570 is just a touch better than GTX 480's and, obviously, way superior to the GTX 470's and HD 5870's. High-ish clocks and a '480-matching number of cores compensate for any performance degradation resulting from the smaller frame-buffer and narrower bus width.

Please bear in mind that 'Extreme' tessellation isn't applicable for most games - they're more likely to use 'Moderate' tessellation.