My aim was to add a very simple demo in GPU Caps Viewer, a tessellated triangle, and to see if hardware tessellation worked fine on both NVIDIA GeForce and ATI Radeon cards. Here is (in an OpenGL-spec-like way) the five programmables units (vertex, tess control, tess evaluation, geometry and fragment) and the fixed-function tessellator:
In short, in an GL 4 / DX11 class hardware, there are 3 units dedicated to the tessellation: two units are programmable (the tessellation control unit and the tessellation evaluation unit) and one is a fixed-function unit (the tessellation primitive generator also called the tessellator). I already covered a bit the hardware tessellation in this article. Not really terrible… So I decided to look at one of the killer features of OpenGL 4: the tessellation for a new demo in GPU Caps Viewer. But, actually, the support is limited to the use of an OpenGL 4.1 context to read OpenGL caps. Yesterday I released GPU Caps Viewer 1.8.9 with OpenGL 4.1 support.
