This unit is reminiscent of ATI's earlier "TruForm" technology, used initially in the Radeon 8500, which performed a similar function in hardware.[5] While this tessellation hardware is not part of the current OpenGL or Direct3D requirements, and competitors such as the GeForce 8 series lack similar hardware, Microsoft has included Tessellation as part of their D3D10.1 future plans.[6] The "TruForm" technology from the past received little attention from software developers and was only utilized in a few game titles (such as Madden NFL 2004, Serious Sam, Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, and unofficially Morrowind), because it was not a feature shared with NVIDIA GPUs which had a competing Tessellation solution using Quintic-RT patches which met with even less support from developers.[7] Since the Xenos contains similar hardware, and Microsoft sees hardware surface tessellation as a major GPU feature with proposed implementation of hardware tessellation support in future DirectX releases (presumably DirectX 11),[4][6] dedicated hardware tessellation units may receive increased developer awareness in future titles. It remains to be seen whether ATI's implementation will be compatible with the eventual DirectX standard.
