Microsoft DirectX 8.0 (Visual Basic)

Improved Quality through Resolution Enhancement

Current primitives are not ideal for representing smooth surfaces. Higher-order interpolation methods, such as cubic polynomials, allow more accurate calculations in rendering curved shapes. This provides increased realism by reducing or eliminating faceting artifacts visible on silhouette edges or on specular surface lighting. Furthermore, when tessellation occurs on the chip, the tessellated triangles do not impact the bus bandwidth. In many cases, a small amount of tessellation can provide improvements in image quality with minimal performance impact.

Microsoft® Direct3D® for Microsoft DirectX® 8.0 provides a simple way to apply resolution enhancement to content created by existing polygon-oriented tools and art pipelines. The application need only provide a desired level of tessellation, and transmit the data using standard triangle syntax that includes normal vectors.