I don't remember hearing about this. What was inaccurate about what the guy in the video said?
Debugging in the editor or game or otherwise to show verticies and geometry gets rid of LOD, tessellation distance settings, and culling. That is what the techreport "article" used to report on how inefficient the game's tessellation was and how it was uselessly tessellating flat surfaces. The debug view quite literally shows tons of triangles being tessellated that otherwise would not. So tessellation under the city, at the distance, on all objects at all times or whatever is just plain wrong. In the actual game, it is not doing that, just in the debug view.
Likewise, the style of tessellation used on most objects in Crysis 2 is not too expensive in spite of tessellating quite a bit at close range, that is just the nature of how the technique works. Not everything was set up to use displacement (which is more expensive).
Link to how Cryengine tessellation works
I basically have to explain this every time this urban legend / myth is brought up. And after all these years, it persists in spite of Crengine engineers typing up posts on their forums about it and the existence of Maldo's mod and finding which give the user easy control to test what is actually expensive in crysis 2.
All the people back then complaining when the dx11 upgrade came out were just uninformed. Tessellation was not sapping performance, rather the crazy high sample counts for shading, post processing, and particle shading were tanking performance on GPUs back then... waaaaaaaay more then the tiny cost of tessellation.
I was looking into Project Cars and stumbled upon
this from their forums.
Apparently there were some allegations claiming that SMS intentionally crippled the amd version of Project Cars. SMS comes out and says that the last time AMD ever talked to them was October of 2014 and that Nvidia has been consistently helping them.
AMD crippled their performance in that game by not supporting defered contexts.
