By Reto.Dave, Environment/Props/Concept Artist
Displacement mapping is a technique for adding geometric detail to the mesh the shader is applied to.
Compared to with normal maps, which works by just altering the surface normal to fake the amount of detail in the mesh detail, displacement mapping alters the mesh itself.
I’ve made some examples that i hope can show you how displacement mapping works and looks with a normal map and a diffuse map.
For this example I’ve used the texture maps from the Stone Bridge in “Medium french Village” more precisely from the foundation of the bridge.
These are the images we use, they have all been drawn in Photoshop, but could just as well have been renderdt from a high-poly object. Rendering maps from high-poly objects gives the best and most accurate result, but it takes more time to model a high-poly object to render from, than it does to draw grey-scale normal or displacement map in Photoshop, but if time is on your side highpoly objects is preferred, if time is not so much on your side drawing them in Photoshop will do fine 
Diffuse map
This is the map that defines the surface main color look.
Normal map
This is used to faking the lightning of bumps, dents, scratces and so on without added more polygons.
Displacement map
This is the map we use to for the displacement mapping, where black represents the absolute lowest and white represents the highest point. It adds a lot of details to the conture of the object.
Last but not least a ‘DirectX 11′-only feature we also use, called Tesselation which adds more polygons to an object the closer you get to it.
If you want to know more about tesselation, Nvidia has published an article about it here: Nvidia.com
Over and out!
Reto.dave
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So this means that DX11 will be in this game! Awesome!
That's the most Tess I'v ever seen in any game, even in large brand "DX 11" labeled games..
Awesome.
That's because a lot of company's just throw Dx11 in and say: "Here you go folks, we are to lazy and money hungry to give you a fully implemented Dx11."
Stupid greedy AAA companys.. only focusing on consoles and on milking the **** out of people.
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Anways, this is awesome!
Your right, many cross platform games, mostly so called AAA titles, end up working to the lowest common denominator, which are the consoles.
I dont understand...at all...lol but im sure its awesome! WHOO!